In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, episode 2, Mami, Madoka, et. al. go into an abandoned building and fight with a witch, saving a woman who tried to commit suicide due to the witch’s influence. Mami is showing the others what it means to be a magical girl, and how dangerous it can be, if they choose to make a contract with Kyubey and become magical girls themselves.
As they enter the building, prominently displayed is some graffiti: not gang markings or such as we would expect, but precisely written text, in German. In fact, it’s a quote from Faust. This is what we see as the prospective suicide enters the building:
Click for larger version, full size is available through a second link. Sorry I can't go full size in one; blame WP.
And this is as the girls enter:
Again, make with the clicky to read
When the theme of the episode is “Do you really want to make a dangerous deal to become a Magical Girl?”, seeing quotes from the the most famous deal with the Devil in all of Western Literature is not comforting. This is not your mommy’s magical girl series, whatever it may be… it’s looking to be dark and serious with a cutsey facade just long enough to suck you in. I am beginning to think that Shinbo started by asking the question, “What if magical girls really fought evil? Not someone who just needed a hug when they were growing up, not some cutesy caricature of evil, but real, honest-to-badness Evil-with-a-capital-E? How would that change the formula?”
Quite a lot, I suspect.
And on another note, the BGM is still spectacular, especially while in the otherworldly spaces the witches create.
