Everyone in Ami's entire grade can recognize projective empathy:
They can
now, and are okay with it now. After spending years in a group where they've been getting told it's a good thing and drowned under the emotions of those that think so.
So... yes, the children that have been mind controlled think that being mind controlled is fine.
I would like to have been able to ask the ones that
hadn't been mind controlled, but they don't functionally exist anymore.
Projective empathy doesn't let psions choose what someone else feels, anyway. It only projects the psion's own emotions. It can't let a psion decide someone else's emotions, or beliefs, or opinions. Mind control might let them do that, but these kids wouldn't use mind control like that.
It lets you project your own emotions and feelings, meaning other people now feel the same as you.
It's not freehand editing, sure, but it automatically casts "Agree with me" in terms of emotions, so that's not really an important distinction.
It's hard to say much about any passive effects, with how little we know about them. I'm wary of taking your word for it, or Saaya's. Saaya is a biased source, and "
fairly clueless". For your part, I know Baughn doesn't agree with you on a bunch of this stuff, and I don't know how much nonpublic information you're arguing off of. Anything you got to write the Saaya interlude would only have needed to cover Saaya's interpretation of what was going on.
I'm arguing from pretty much what is in plain text in the Saaya segment I quoted. Psionics broadcast their emotions and opinions to some extent, and people without psionics can't tell it's coming from 'outside' instinctively.
They might be able to deductively reason it, but as you saw with Saaya, it's basically having someone whispering into your subconscious.
Also, the complete quote on "fairly clueless" is:
Essentially my take on it. Amu's passive aura, when it exists, is weak. She absolutely could blast it out at full strength and more or less brainwash someone -- she does that with Utau, which escapes being brain-washing because it's barely overcoming Utau's native resistance, and hardly counts as a 'passive' once it involves giant pink beams of doom -- but, mostly, it's just putting a thumb on the scale.
The issue is, it's putting a thumb on the scale in the same way, regardless of her actions, for years. Despite her stated preferences, sometimes.
Saaya is reacting similarly to how I think Nero would react. She isn't completely wrong -- Amu is psychic, though so are half the other kids in class -- and there is, actually, a problem here -- but you shouldn't take that as an affirmation of her conclusions. She's still fairly clueless.
Amu isn't brainwashing everyone she goes nearby. She would have noticed that. But while I'm willing to say so, I don't think Nero is. Which doesn't mean we disagree on any of the particulars.
This quote also shows that Baughn and I do actually agree on what is mechanically happening with the aura.
We just have different opinions on the acceptable amount of low level mind control that the aura is.
He considers the 'thumb on the scale' acceptable, I do not.
We have the same conclusion on the aura's actual effects.
Anyway, I'm going to point out that a passive aura isn't anyone deciding how anyone else feels either. It's not a matter of conscious decision at all. Until Ami discovers it, it doesn't reflect on Ami's ethics in any way. We'll need to discover it before we can bring it up in any in-story ethics talk with Ami. (Likely by talking to Saaya.)
I... somewhat agree, but my point is more that this is horrific and alarming, and that Ami needs to be taught better.
Possibly doesn't reflect her
ethics, but self awareness is definitely an issue, if she knows Utau and Hikaru's backstories and doesn't stop to consider the damage she's already done herself.
Now, saying that, she
is a child and so being void of self awareness is to be expected.
Doesn't make it any less horrifying for the poor kids that had to suffer before she learns.
This is probably a very alien mindset to you. You seem to have a very hard time believing it could be the result of anything but mind rape. Psionics likely tipped the scale, but the mentality isn't fundamentally all that out there. Plenty of people are happy about the idea of, say, an omnipotent deity monitoring their thoughts and judging everything they do. Being happy about the friendly little girl two seats down hearing your thoughts isn't so strange.
Yes, that mindset is alien and horrific to me. And the idea of someone not just reading but
altering is even worse.
Note that when Ami talks to her parents, she does not overcome their value system, either consciously or passively. Any passive effect is too weak to do such a thing, and she has no interest in doing it deliberately. She is not the kind of person who wants to decide how others feel.
Because she is
now choosing not to, after her parents brought it up.
Meaning she was doing so previously.
She mentions in the text that doing it this way isn't what she prefers, and continues to mind read them.
Again, she clearly doesn't know better.
The real blame rests with Tsukasa, I guess, for gathering psionic children and then putting non-psionics within Mental Range of them.
Why he is creating such a horribly victim rich environment, who knows.
He's got multiple failures to protect the less powerful kids from the psionics he's deliberately gathering under his belt at this point.
