Vocational Aesthetics: Voice, Affect, and Energy in Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011)

In a death heard around the otaku world, Mami is decapitated by a witch who transforms into a worm with teeth. Before Mami's slaying, we hear her react with a voiced gasp—two hoarse, fragile notes—and her friends each inhale and exhale a two-note sequence in response. Then, the witch bites off Mami's head. As one of the main characters of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Mami is an unlikely candidate for murder in episode 3, so early in the season (especially considering the conventions of the series' genre, mahou shōjo, or, "magical girl" anime).¹ Reaction videos show fans breathing hard and covering their mouths in disbelief, grabbing their necks as if in empathy and yelling "oh shit!," and exhaling an "ohhhhhhhhhhh" as a horrified threesecond glissando.² Headless Mami soon becomes a meme, getting her own Twitter account and Tumblr page.³ Six years after her demise, she is named one of the top "5 Brutal Anime Deaths that Ruined Us for Life" by Dorkly online magazine.⁴

Puella Magi Madoka Magica is about magical girls who fight witches. The show is a bait-and-switch; its upbeat theme song and candy-coated opening credits belie dark themes, which become increasingly apparent as the series proceeds. Its most shocking revelation is in episode 9 out of the 12, when the nature of the death battles between magical girls and witches is finally explained. It turns out that an alien species is harvesting the emotional energy expended by magical girls and using it to counteract the heat death of the universe. The redistribution of energy by an alien technology ensures the robustness of an interplanetary ecosystem, but comes at great cost to the girls themselves, who are transformed into witches once their anguish reaches its apex, and are then forced to fight other magical girls to the death. Kyubey is the alien responsible for conscripting teenagers into this brutal thermoeconomy; he explains that adolescent girls are chosen because "they have the most intense fluctuations of hope and despair," rendering their energy more successful in preventing entropic decay.⁵ Madoka Magica joins Sailor Moon, Monsters, Inc., Monsters University, The Dark Crystal, and others to form of subgenre of media fantasies of living energy extraction.

Madoka Magica's eschatological nightmare is based on the real-life theory of the heat death of the universe. One of several possible projections of end times from the field of physical cosmology, heat death is a logical extension of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy increases over time, with entropy defined both as a measure of the disorganization of a system and as unavailable energy. The progressive increase in chaos and unusable energy leading to heat death is not exactly the same as freezing as we understand it. Elizabeth Oakes clarifies: "Heat death simply means that temperature differences may no longer be used to perform work."⁶ Madoka Magica translates the idea of temperature difference to emotional volatility, a quality commonly associated with adolescence more generally and feminine adolescence in particular. In the world of Madoka Magica, the girls' explosive emotional breakdowns provide energy to perform work for the universe at large.

While work is a term with specialized meaning in physics, it has historically comingled with understandings of work as human labor. As Anson Rabinbach details in The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, thermodynamics provided the conceptual underpinnings for notions of work across scale. This energetic model of work influenced important theories and practices of labor from Marxism to Taylorism, a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century American system of labor management adopted by European and Japanese industries (the latter of which adapted the American precedent to fit a Japanese context).⁷ Indeed, according to nineteenth-century materialism, which informed Taylorism and many other approaches to labor through World War II:

Nature and society were assimilated to a single vision of the unity of all work. The universal laws of energy applied equally to the movements of the planets, the forces of nature, the mechanical...