How Does Madoka Anime Explain Homura'S Time Loops?

These loops show Homura trying to prevent one very tragic event from happening and in trying, shows how stubborn and refusing to accept this tragic event she is. Puella Magi Madoka Magica explains how she became a magical girl and her magical powers in the anime. Homura became a magical girl by making a contract with Kyubey, the Incubator of Magical Girls. The magical girl powers that she holds are centered around time and specifically to rewind, stop and slow time down to a save point. Every time a timeline of events goes wrong (such as Madoka getting hurt, someone dying, or Homura failing at saving someone), Homura travels back to a previous save point of when she had tried to save them. Every time she does this however, everyone else besides herself gets reset along with the world around her and she is left to carry the memories of her previous failures around with her. This is the way the anime portrays her to be: the only time traveler. Her Soul-Gem existence and her unique magical ability to travel through time allows her to retain her consciousness throughout the rewritings of reality.

Homura manages to retain her skills, her arsenal, her knowledge and even her pain from past failures as she rewinds back to the point where she failed to save Madoka. This makes her devolve into an obsessive and somewhat bipolar character who is only able to move forward by planning every detail and exploiting the tiniest loopholes in time’s natural flow in order to continue her crusade to prevent the same mistakes from happening over and over again.

Later the plot reveals that Madoka’s ultimate wish completely rewrote reality and even the system of magic by which the series ran. So all the time before that had been building to some sort of desperate, tragic sacrifice on Homura’s part, the attempts at rescue slowly wearing her down into increasingly desperate, even obsessive, behavior. The movie Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie: Rebellion explores what happens when Homura’s rescue of Madoka is no longer sufficient, but for basic information about Homura’s situation in the TV series, time magic that preserves a single mind while the rest of reality around them collapses again and again, and Homura’s repeated attempts to rescue her at the cost of her own sanity, until she is exhausted.

My own late-night rewatchings of the series interpret the ‘loops’ largely in terms of character. The structure is given to us as a temporal ability on the part of Homura – the ability to ‘rewind’ to a point in time in the past whilst retaining a complete memory of what has just transpired, and everything else around her appearing to ‘reset’ to a certain extent. We are given two key points regarding Homura’s ability: 1) she is a magical girl; 2) her ability allows her to ‘rewrite’ events again and again, and it is these rewrites that she remembers long after the world around her has continued to move on. These rewrites, and her attempts to change the course of events, comprise the bulk of the ‘loops’.

Think of each loop as a save file, with only the character who initiated the loop (Homura) able to retain their memories and keep their character file intact between re-writes. Homura tries lots of different things within the loop, like writing a different scenario, or getting a different character to be in the story, or making Madoka make a different choice, or winning a battle in a different way, but ultimately it’s the system of magical girls and the grief that leads to them becoming witches that she can’t defeat. The number of loops that there are is never made completely clear in the show (it’s possible that Homura relives dozens, or hundreds, of versions of her life before the very last), but Homura’s growing endurance and determination between each re-write makes her all the more epic. And by the time Madoka makes her wish, Homura’s experiences in the previous loops are revealed to have been the brutal and emotional preparation necessary for her final transformation.

I try to distill this down to three points: 1) Homura gets time-manipulation from a magical contract, 2) she uses that to go back in time to before things go wrong, and 3) she is the only one who remembers anything between loops. We see her freeze time, rewind after failure to save a life, and arrive back at the start of a day, all while having been in that day before. However, each loop is also emotionally scarring and shapes her into a singularly-focused protector of Madoka.

Moreover, in the universe of Puella Maestra, magical girls have hopes that take the shape of soul gems which can become witch corruption-marks, and Incubators manipulate the girls’ wishes to that end. Thus Homura’s loops are a means to her end of outsmarting the system of magical girls in general. The TV series ends by Madoka rewriting the basic laws of the universe, thus retroactively deciding upon the end of Homura’s time-travel loops. Homura’s struggles in the movie Puella Maestra Rebellion are then focused on dealing with the aftermath of these basic changes to the universe. For me, though, these time-travel loops above all else show how Homura is changed by them, and how in this world time travel is conceivable in the first place.