I look deep into your heart and soul
Make your wildest dreams come true
I got voodoo, I got hoodoo, I got things I ain’t even tried
And I’ve got friends on the other side
- Dr. Facilier, “Friends on the Other Side”

If there’s anything to learn from Dr. Faustus, it’s that sorcery is one big con job.

A confidence man isolates a mark.  He makes them feel like they’re committing a crime, or at least doing something that they can’t tell anyone about.  Then he tricks them out of something precious.  A conman could, for example, pretend that he’s been hit by someone’s car and demand a few hundred dollars “just to cover hospital fees,” which they’ll gladly pay over facing the risk of penalty.  Or how about the Nigerian Letter?

In the very best con games, the mark doesn’t even realize they’re being conned.  They think in some small way that their prayers have been answered.  At least for a while.

In the world of Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica, magical girls become what they are by contracting with a supernatural patron, who bestows upon them a jewel containing their powers.  To maintain these jewels, magical girls must periodically sacrifice enemies called witches and use their “grief seeds.”  Combined with the many onscreen Goethe quotes, the devil’s deal theme is fairly explicit here.

But I’m also noticing that this system is an economy in miniature, with grief seeds as the resource and magical girls as the consumers.  Mami, the mentor figure, has already stated that this relationship between their power and their prey causes competition among magical girls.

So why go out of one’s way to recruit more?  Mami is making this too easy.  She says that this is dangerous work, but she neatly shields the girls from danger when they go on their practice run.  And in any case, all that the girls can think about is the wish that comes with their contract.  Become a magical girl, and you can make any dream come true!  How amazing!

It distracts them.  But of course it does.

Here’s what I think: The tea-sipping, ever-confident Mami is going to use her initial kindness and “you’re making this choice for yourself” sales pitch to lure Madoka into… something.  The girls are rubes, and the other shoe will eventually drop, but how badly off they will be depends on what’s really at stake.  That is, the real resource in this struggle may not be energy as such, but the information about where exactly that energy comes from.

 

She's got friends on the other side.

To put it another way, we need to keep asking: What are grief seeds made of? Because if the answer is “the broken dreams of magical girls,” then this affair takes on a whole new dimension of wrongness.

Further reading

Ten of the most famous confidence games, for your reading pleasure.

A thoughtful post from THAT Anime Blog about how lonely it all is.