“You can wish for whatever you want. There's no rule saying you have to be the one to benefit from it. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened.”
Kyubey Quotes
5 quotes from Puella Magi Madoka Magica, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The Incubator: a small white creature that grants wishes, never lies, and never mentions the part that matters. The series' villain is a contract, and Kyubey is the voice that reads it aloud, one clause at a time, always after it has been signed.
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Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“On this planet, you call females who have yet to become adults "girls". It makes sense then that since you'll eventually become witches, you should be called "magical girls".”
In Japanese this is a pun and in English it is an insult. The word for witch, majo, is spelled with the first and last characters of the word for magical girl, mahou shoujo, so Kyubey is pointing out that the name has always contained its own ending: a magical girl is a witch-in-waiting, and the language knew. The dub cannot reproduce that and does something honest instead, rendering the logic without the wordplay, so that what reaches an English viewer is the reasoning of a creature that thinks a naming convention is a sufficient answer to a girl watching her friend hatch. Some fan translations gloss the line with a note. The choice to leave it unglossed is defensible: the coldness survives even when the joke does not, and the coldness is the point. What is lost is the sense that the trap was in the title of the genre.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“That wish! Once it's granted, it will unravel the fabric of time itself! It violates the laws of karmic destiny! Are you trying to become a god?!”
For eleven episodes Kyubey's menace was that nothing surprised him; here he is written as a man watching his stock portfolio collapse, and the exclamation points are the sound of a character being spent. The moment is earned in outline, since the show needs the Incubator to lose once and this is the once. But the wording does a strange thing: it has the being who explained entropy to a fourteen-year-old like a physics lecturer suddenly talking about "the fabric of time" and "the laws of karmic destiny", vocabulary from a different, worse show. Kyubey's last line of consequence is the one place he sounds like a villain, which is exactly what the series had refused to make him.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I can't believe you'd prefer the worst possible fate...Honestly, I can't comprehend why human thought is so illogical.”
Ryuk in Death Note is the closest cousin: a non-human who set the game up, watches for entertainment, and reports the players' choices back to us as puzzling. The difference is where each of them stands at the end. Ryuk was always outside the story and says so, and when Light finally begs, the shinigami is amused. Kyubey here is inside the isolation field he built, watching Homura choose to become a witch in the shell rather than let him touch Madoka, and the incomprehension is not amusement. It is the sound of an experiment failing. Death Note's non-human is a spectator to the human tragedy. Madoka's is a participant who lacks the one organ the tragedy runs on, and the film has him say so out loud, a beat before he loses.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“There's no doubt now. Trying to put human emotions to use is just too dangerous for us. We could never hope to control something whose final form is so irrational.”
The Incubators concede, and the concession is the only thing in the franchise that reads as a victory for the humans, so it matters what it commits them to. Kyubey is not saying the harvest was wrong. He is saying it was unsafe, which is a different admission, and one that leaves the door open for a species that would accept the loss of a few planets for the energy. Homura's answer in the next line is to keep him: the curses she has unleashed need cleaning up, and the Incubators are now staff. That is the actual consequence of this speech. The creature that ran the universe's most efficient farm has been conscripted by its former livestock, and its last recorded opinion is that emotion is bad engineering. Nothing in the film disagrees with him. It just hands him the mop.
Read Kyubey's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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A salesman answering a hypothetical from a girl who is obviously asking about the cellist in the hospital, and the line does three jobs at once for the story. It confirms to Sayaka that the wish she wants is allowed. It lets Mami deliver the warning about motives that the episode needs on the record before she dies. And it plants the aside about precedent, which pays out over episodes seven and ten, when Kyoko's wish for her father and Homura's wish for Madoka turn out to be exactly that kind of wish and to have gone exactly that kind of wrong. Kyubey is not lying in any clause. The series builds its whole argument about consent on the fact that he never does. What he leaves out is the entire subject of the show, and this is where the leaving-out begins.