There are a surprising number of similarities between the anime universe of Madoka Magica and our current economic system. I didn't just make this up, I've been thinking about it for a few months now. After sufficient time, I have made this completely up and even wrote a log line and story beats in case any aspiring script writers are interested in making an adaptation based on the idea. Here goes the theory... First, the pun between a soul gem bearing magical girl and a singularly owned sole-proprietorship seems overly obvious, but it's just the tip of the iceberg for everything about the show being analogous to some economic feature or system. There is the feeding cycle between pedestrian consumers, witch corporations, and a magical girl sole-proprietorship; where people feed witches their money, defeated witches rejuvenate magical girls' spent assets, and occasionally a magical girl that loses faith in her cause becomes corrupted and incorporates into a publicly traded C-Corp... I mean, she transforms into a soulless witch. Let's delve deeper into the contracts formed between incubators (QBs) and the magical girls (private, entrepreneurial citizens). There is nothing in a contract that obligates a magical girl to become a witch, it's simply the logical outcome of an indefinite period where specific circumstances will cause her to transform. This is similarly not a guaranteed requirement in the real world either. Indeed, Homura not only survived an indefinite number of iterations of her one month with Madoka and the others, she even proves that one need not ever transform based on her staying a magical girl past the end of the show (until the QBs forced her into a hopeless prison for the movie). The show had some natural deux ex machina law that required magical girls to transform, and reality could go in that direction too with specific circumstances. Let's say that a small business is failing and has a lot of debtors. Courts can seize the company (the owner's assets) and distribute either assets or revenues to debtors to settle the debt. If there is a single debtor, such as a bank, or is a single debtor with enough capital to buy out the others in exchange for exclusive control, such as a bank, then that debtor has total control to how the company ends its existence; which could include being sold to a venture capitalist, being incorporated and being sold via stock offering, or simply being liquidated for cash. Most banks will liquidate assets and hope to cover losses, but a savvy bank might invest in a freshly failed venture just to sell it on the stock market as a publicly traded corporation