The Will of the Universe

The Universe's Antibodies.

The Will of the Universe (宇宙の意思, Uchuu no Ishi) is a concept capable of changing probability, as well as forces of nature itself, within special circumstances. It is defined differently through different installments of the series, therefore the name is purely coincidental.

In Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story

In Magia Record, the "Will of the Universe", or just "the Universe," is initially recognized as simply a theory proposed by Tasuke Satomi. According to him, the universe itself attempts to prevent any and all information about Magical Girls from leaking to the general, non-magical public.

Touka herself first theorizes about a force that keeps magic a secret when all her attempts at revealing any proof of it through the internet fail to gain any attention.

In The Ash Grey Revolution, the phenomenon foils Folklore of 0's attempts to reveal Magical Girls to the public and create a support group for them in Yukuni. At the time, Magical Girls in Yukuni were under scrutiny due to a faction of people which opposed them and the phenomenon resulted in a Witch to cause a bus crash which then made Asahi's, Alexandra's and Lavi's magic to go out of control. They originally meant for the people at the festival to converse with their deceased loved ones, but due to the bus crash at the same time, the spirits of those who died in it also manifested and the festival-goers were subjected to their unending cries of pain. The phenomenon, or its "antibodies," did later appear in battle against Folklore of 0 and they were unable to defeat them.

During Arc 2, Chapter 12, Touka and Nemu are able to circumvent the phenomenon by turning the Magical Girls of Kamihama into Uwasa. This was done in order to fight against Winchester, who had overtaken the Doppel System, as well as the minds of the Magical Girls at the time. Their new forms allowed them to avoid triggering the unfortunate events which would have befallen them had they been normal Magical Girls, which Mikoto had been using to her advantage.

In Null Magical Girl

In Null Magical Girl Climax: Which is the Path to the Inner Universe?, the universe is presented as a self-reproducing living organism. Souls are themselves revealed to be particle-like units of fate called destinos, as emotional energy reduces entropy by collapsing multiple possible futures into a single timeline. Memory reduces the entropy of the past to one story, while prediction reduces the entropy of the future to one expectation. When both reach zero possibility they form an eternal circuit, a living destiny and every soul is such a time loop, a knot of emotional energy that minimizes possibilities.

During its life cycle, the Universe Organism reproduces through black holes and ends in heat death, itself being overtaken by a black hole and starting anew and creating an endless web. The natural, healthy direction of the universe is the relentless increase of entropy, which is the multiplication of possible states until nothing can change, thus the opposite of fate.

As Magical Girls draw on emotional energy, which directly opposes entropy, they artificially prolong the universe's lifespan itself. Following this logic, ordinary Magical Girl activity is a tolerable delay, but any uprising of Magical Girls would threaten the universe with sterility and immortality. The eventual emergence of the Homo magica and their cancerous self-sustaining system traps the universe in such a stasis.

The universe possesses an immune system in the form of the symmetry chrysalis, a preserved remnant of the Big Bang’s initial conditions. Inside it, fundamental laws are still unbroken, in a state before asymmetry was introduced, and thus the constants of physics can be rewritten. Kosane Kiriha states that "the universe is equipped with the will to eliminate Magical Girls" and "has developed an immune system that eliminates Magical Girls. When an existence that opposes Magical Girls appears, the universe will offer them revelations and grant them a hidden power." As Kosane is a null Magical Girl who lacks a soul, she is able to receive the chrysalis and uses it to modify physical phenomena such as Planck's constant or the wave function to teleport planets and fire gamma-ray bursts, among other things.

Trivia

• The Will of the Universe seems to affect Magical Girls specifically, ignoring Witches as well as other magical beings like Uwasa as can be seen in the finale of Arc 2.
• It is unknown why the phenomenon seemed to be mostly inactive during the majority of the events of Tart Magica, but it can be theorized that it was due to France being under Isabeau's Barrier at the time, which also made Witches visible to normal people.
• The Universe's "Antibodies" bear a resemblance to the aura that Wraiths give out, suggesting a connection between them, or that the Wraiths are extensions of the Will of the Universe created after Madoka rewrote its laws. However, this connection is only a fanmade analysis and not confirmed.
  • It is also unknown if the aforementioned antibodies are somehow connected to the symmetry chrysalis of the universe, or whether they are one and the same.