The taglines in the latest WnK trailer - 'The her I wished for / the me she wished for" - are striking, not just for their parallels but because they raise a fascinating question: What kind of Madoka does Homura actually want and vice versa?
Homura claims at the of Rebellion that it's enough for her if she can create a world where Madoka can be happy. I am not entirely sure I believe her, but Homura's biggest problem is that the same qualities that she loves about Madoka - her kindness, warmth, and compassion - are the exact qualities that always drive them apart. As a result, Homura focuses not on changing Madoka's nature, but her circumstances in order to get the outcome sh wants.
For Homura, the ideal Madoka is the one from the flower field scene who earnestly claims she will never abandon Homura. Unfortunately, this is only possible in the idyllic dreamworld that Homura unconsciously creates, and which Homura destroys with her own actions. When she tries to recreate it at the end of Rebellion, she discovers that she can no longer be close to Madoka without risking the entire project. Madoka and Homura can only be happy together as equals - in Homura's first world, they were equally ignorant of their own histories, and it worked, but in the second world, they are fundamentally unequal and of course the universe naturally seeks to balance itself by putting Madoka on the same level as Homura, which Homura cannot allow because she would lose any leverage or control over the situation.
Homura loves Madoka because of their many timelines together, but in the original series, Madoka cannot return Homura's feelings until she has access to all those timelines and memories herself, by which point she is a concept who cannot exist in Homura's world. The very thing that Madoka needs to do to be the partner that Homura truly wants is the exact thing that Homura now refuses to permit! Essentially, by the end of Rebellion, Homura has settled for "well, if I can't have what I really want, I'll be content with what I can get"... which works right up to the point where her doppelganger shows up with a steel chair and starts romancing Madoka herself. Oops.
Okay, so to flip the question on its head, what kind of Homura does Madoka want? Like Homura, I think Madoka would be happy with Homura simply being herself - her real, vulnerable, emotional self, not the facade she puts up, i.e., the Moemura we saw at the beginning of Rebellion - but that's not something Homura can give her by the end of Rebellion for all the reasons outlined above. So the movie ends with essentially no relationship between the two - or at the very least, they are distant strangers with none of the closeness and intimacy they shared at the beginning of the movie.
But then a Homura doppelganger appears on her way to school one day, and suddenly, Madoka finds herself being courted by this strange, beautiful, mysterious girl who is obsessed with her. (Recall how everyone at school reacted to Homura when she turned up in episode 1 of the original series.) The doppelganger sweeps Madoka off her feet - literally, in the dance scene - and tells her she's special. That she could be more. That the nagging sense of uncertainty - the sense that she's missing a part of herself and the world is not what it seems - is real. That they are meant for each other. And so on.
The doppeganger has an agenda but she also has answers, and as we saw in the original series, Madoka wants to know, wants to have a purpose, to be a part of something bigger and change the world. The original Homura does not want to give her any of this - but she might not have any choice in the matter - and the doppelganger will, even if, as I've said, she has her own motives for doing so and the truth she shares isn't necessarily the whole of it.
(FWIW, my gut feeling is that the doppelganger wants to destroy the Law of Cycles and also the world, so there is nothing for Madoka to save and no way for Madoka to leave her - which is the wish Homura herself expressed in episode 10 of the original series, and still holds on some deep level, even if she's not consciously aware of it - which has now manifested as a separate entity that is actively sabotaging her.)
As long as Madoka is acting out of ignorance, she will continue to make decisions to risk herself, simply because she doesn't understand the consequences. If she has full knowledge and awareness, she may still risk herself, but at least she will know what she is doing and why. Keeping her ignorant doesn't make her safer, it just puts her in a different kind of danger. And as of yet, the circumstances haven't changed sufficiently to allow for any way out of this vicious cycle.
At their core, doppelganger stories are fundamentally about identity - who we are, who we want to be - and the whole point is that the doppelganger is simultaneously everything we are and everything we aren't - the worst parts of ourselves, but also the person we wish we were, the ideal self we've always dreamed of becoming - and the horror comes from how this perfect stranger, who is better at being us than we are, neatly slides into our lives and takes over everything, and no one notices the difference. And I think this is exactly what we'll see in WnK, with Madoka drawn to Homura's doppelganger and Homura struggling to counter her influence in a world where she has no one but herself to rely on (at least at first). All Madoka has to do is listen to the doppelganger and do what she says, and everything will be perfect, at least from the doppelganger's point of view.
(My other gut feeling is that the movie will play into this dynamic by having lots of MadoHomu moments with the "wrong" Homura, and by having the doppelganger be more physically involved with Madoka, especially in weird or uncomfortable ways, like sticking her fingers in her mouth as we saw in one of the trailers. I think the doppelganger's feelings and actions for Madoka will have more eros along with the yandere elements - though it will still be mostly plausibly deniable queer subtext - while the original Homura will be more chaste and platonic in comparison. I'd be happy to be wrong about this, but so far the franchise has been very careful to toe the line when it comes to overt declarations of physical attraction and romance and I don't expect that to change in this movie despite the oodles of queer subtext, not when they can make far more money with less controversy by keeping it ambiguous or letting the "bad" Homura take the fall.
By the same token, I would not be surprised if one of the "twists" at the end of the movie hinges on "mistaken identity", with characters and/or the audience making incorrect assumptions about what they're actually seeing and who is who.)
In order for Homura to become "the me [Madoka] wished for," Homura has to break. She has to hit rock bottom and drop the walls and facades and illusions. She has to fail, utterly and completely - and one ultimately responsible for her defeat is herself. Only in the ashes of the old world can a new world be born; only by facing herself, literally and metaphorically, can Homura become the person Madoka truly wants her to be - herself, though preferably without all the self-hatred Homura has been dragging around for her entire life.
The real question, of course, is "is it possible for Homura and Madoka to be happy as equals when both parties have access to the full range of knowledge and powers available to them?" which WnK will presumably explore. Hopefully, the answer is yes, but we'll have to see exactly how that plays out - perhaps via surprise loophole or secret third thing, which allows the seemingly impossible to suddenly become possible.
"The her I wished for / the me she wished for" have been there the whole time. The tragedy is that thus far they only get to be together for a brief time before being pulled apart by fate and circumstances. But wishes are the source of miracles, so perhaps these two wishes will finally be realized in this movie - and the reciprocity will be what makes it work.
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