Mami Tomoe

"I'm Mami Tomoe I'm a ninth grader at Mitakihara Middle School and once I made a contract with Kyubey I became a magical girl"

- Mami Tomoe

Mami Tomoe is a magical girl who appears to Madoka and Sayaka as they are attacked by a Witch in episode 1. She is already contracted to Kyubey and offers to act as a mentor to the pair should they choose to become magical girls.

In the spin-off manga Puella Magi Madoka Magica: The Different Story, Mami serves as the main protagonist alongside Kyoko Sakura.

She is voiced by Kaori Mizuhashi in the Japanese version and Carrie Keranen in the English version.

Personality
Mami first appears as an older, more experienced girl, and is one of the first magical girls introduced in the series. She is shown to have feminine tastes, such as drinking tea and dressing with flower clips in her hair and bows on her shoes.

She has a strong sense of personal justice, which keeps her on the path of helping innocents despite gaining little reward for it. This sense of justice also makes it difficult for her to team up with other magical girls for more than short periods, as many will only fight witches for the chance of finding a Grief Seed or in self-defense, and many others are against teaming up with their "competition" in hunting witches. These circumstances compound with her lonely nature as an orphan who has trouble making friends at school due to her having little time for much outside of witch hunting, which has turned Mami into a very isolated person looking for friends.

She has been shown to take the harsh truths of the magical girl system quite badly depending on the circumstances, and at times has proven to be unstable and dangerous when confronted with them.

Mami always uses honorifics and calls people by their surname with the honorific '-san'. This shows her age and emotional distance to the other girls, who are younger than her and closer in age to each another.

Plot
Mami is a veteran magical girl and a third-year student at Madoka's school. She lives alone in a penthouse after the death of her parents in a car accident, one which she was able to survive only due to contracting with Kyubey to save her own life. Her magical abilities include being able to produce nearly infinite amounts of Tanegashima-like flintlock rifles, yellow ribbons to suspend her enemies, and healing magic. Mami is particularly focused on saving those around her, with a traditionally selfless perspective on the role of magical girl, and has a habit of giving names to her finishing attacks. Though her outward disposition is cheery and confident, Mami feels deeply alone as she has no friends to confide in or support her as she fights. Madoka offers to become her partner and save her from her loneliness, but Mami is killed immediately after during battle with a witch; as per Madoka's wish, at the close of the final timeline, this witch never existed, and Mami is therefore seen, alive, with Kyoko and Homura at the end of the series. According to Kyubey, she never knew the darker truths concerning Soul Gems and origins of witches. In a previous timeline, learning of these truths drove Mami insane and she attempted to murder the remaining magical girls to prevent them from becoming witches, and in the Oriko Magica timeline, she contemplates letting herself be killed and/or committing suicide so she doesn't become a witch herself. In the PSP game, her witch form is a small fairy like witch named Candeloro.

Weapons, Abilities and Fighting Style
Mami is a veteran and is the most experienced magical girl in Madoka Magica, with Kyubey claiming in Episode 4 that that was the reason why she could afford to battle familiars as well as witches. However, whether she is the most powerful magical girl (discounting Ultimate Madoka), is up to debate.
 * Mami's primary weapons are percussion-lock rifled muskets, which she can summon in large numbers and are fired by hand, remotely or are used as a melee weapon. Expended bullets can summon strings to ensnare the foe.
 * Mami's weapon which she uses for her finishing move, Tiro Finale, is an enormous percussion lock cannon. The cannon and the method of use seems to vary each time she summmons it, implying that she probably creates it to match what she has in mind then.
 * Mami's guns can only shoot one bullet, but the type of the bullet can also vary so it can shoot shotgun shells too.
 * Mami also uses ribbons which she can use to bind enemies. She extends them from her clothing or summons them out of the air.
 * Both Mami's guns and bullets are made of ribbons, her original magical ability.

Trivia
The finishing move Mami used on the witch Gertrud and later Charlotte voiced out as "Tiro Finale" which means "final shot" in Italian. Which sounds suspiciously similar to "Last Shooting", the attack which the RX-78-2 Gundam used in the first Gundam anime after it... lost its head.
 * The character for her last name (巴) literally means "comma design," a Japanese swirl pattern.
 * Her last name can also be used as a first name.
 * Her first name is written in katakana, which has no particular meaning. When written in kanji, it can be read hundreds of ways, some of which are as follows:
 * graceful jewel (雅珠)
 * light of love (愛光)
 * true heart (真心)
 * truth(真実)
 * sea of the heavens (天海)
 * dancing beauty (舞美)
 * dancing light (舞光)
 * polished beauty (磨美)
 * sparkling purple (晶紫)
 * magical beauty (魔美)
 * magical charm/deceiving spirit (魔魅)
 * very flaxen (麻深)
 * beautiful jasmine (茉美)
 * Almost all the kanji examples above are not used commonly, and is unrealistic. One of the most commonly and traditionally used kanji for Mami is 麻美, used in the Chinese translation as shown below.
 * The official Chinese translation uses (麻美) "beautiful hemp" as the kanji for her first name. However, no official kanji of her name exists in the original Japanese version.
 * She is the only character whose first name is written in katakana (contrasting with Madoka, Sayaka and Homura, whose names are written in Hiragana).
 * This can have several implications: firstly, that "Mami" has foreign origins (in line with the "Western flavor" Ume Aoki gave to Mami's magical girl outfit); secondly, that Mami is much, much older than the other girls (an unlikely possibility, considering that katakana was used for girls' names prior to the Asia-Pacific War; the cars in Mami's flashback in Episode 3 look fairly modern)..
 * It is fairly common to use katakana in first name, whether they are of foreign origin or not, especially in modern Japan.
 * The name "Mami" is also fairly common, and it is unlikely that it is of a foreign origin. There is also no implication of Mami being "much older," the cannon information presented so far states that she is in 9th grade.
 * In Mami's case, it is not a traditional name, so that this discussion about naming rules prior to WW2 is not applicable directly.
 * Finally, the creators may simply have been referencing another "Mami" character whose name was written in katakana. For example, the protagonist of the famous magical-girl anime Creamy Mami, the Magic Angel has her name written in katakana rather than hiragana or kanji.
 * Another of Mami's special attacks is her "Tiro Volley" as heard in the Drama CD"Farewell Story".
 * The Reason Mami is hung up in naming her attacks is because she is trying to emulate the Mahou Shoujo from her childhood, it is her own way of gaining the courage to fight witches without feeling terrified.
 * During the Episode 3 Blu-ray commentary, Aoi Yuuki (Madoka), Chiwa Saito (Homura), and Kaori Mizuhashi (Mami) agreed that "Mami" is a very mahou shoujo name.
 * Example: Esper Mami and Creamy Mami, the Magic Angel.
 * Mami won the 2011 Anime Saimoe.
 * Mami is one of two characters who have speaking roles in all three series in the franchise (the second being Kyubey).
 * In her short appearance in Kazumi Magica, Mami is shown wearing white tights instead of dark tights. This matches her original design by Ume Aoki, but not her finalized one from the anime.
 * Mami wears regular panties. Fan artists often imagine her wearing seductive lingerie, but the real Mami is more of an innocent schoolgirl in this respect. Even if she's a bit lonely, she likes to show off on the battlefield, but she is not doing it for the boys/fans.
 * In an interview with Kirara Magica, Mizuhashi Kaori (Mami's seyuu) believes Mami's death makes her memorable.
 * Incidentally, the Mami character archetype helped Mizuhashi Kaori to try something different from her usual voice acting roles.
 * "Sometimes I wonder, "if I didn't accept Mami-san, what would I be doing now?" Those thoughts make me shudder. Not able to escape being typecast-ed is a terrible thing."