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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Evenstar said:
@TarzanNn, @Lailoken: You're getting way too deep into the ninja mindset, IMO. Dismissing Mari as "broken" and therefore no longer valuable is the exact same kind of thought process that leads to the deep, deep stupidity of "skinwastes", "mudfoots" and "softfoots".
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It's not her value I dismiss. She's plenty of that. As far as ninja standards go she may be more valuable now, than she had been during missing-nin days since she's more inclined to finish a given task no matter what.

I don't see her returning to a shiny personality she once was. Ever. All we can really accomplish is make her not a threat to the team and this saddenes me. And the trust won't come back either so meh. :(
 
TarzanNn said:
Wow, it's hard to catch up to all of you



Definitely! Silver eyes with red hair would be plain awful.



Yeah, I agree. We couldn't even help Keiko with just self-esteem priblems, how are we expect to fix Mari.

Actually, understanding this was why I got so angry at Hana. Mari was fighting with J-man for being second most awesome character in my head and the bitch just had to destroy her. Everything after is just a zombie!Mari that I can't bother to care about.





Well, there's always a Plan B: hire a Yamanaka to erase everything Mari is to pre-Hana state.

When that fails, go to Plan C: erase everything and make taijutsu-spec out of her from scratch.

We will have a quite decent chuunin almost immediately since her CR shouldn't drop to default levels even if all other skills do.

Note: Yamanaka should sign EN equivalent of NDA on all clan secrets she'd get access while erasing Mari.
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TarzanNn said:
It's not her value I dismiss. She's plenty of that. As far as ninja standards go she may be more valuable now, than she had been during missing-nin days since she's more inclined to finish a given task no matter what.

I don't see her returning to a shiny personality she once was. Ever. All we can really accomplish is make her not a threat to the team and this saddenes me. And the trust won't come back either so meh. :(
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Respectfully, I disagree. Aside from "we won't know until we try", enough of the thread cares about Mari such that giving up on her isn't likely to occur. That we have multiple regulars with decent insight, mental models of behavior (with positive predictions), and strategies to try and help her bodes well for us.

But also, the detriment to Hazou if he ever made the choice to, say, kill her via mind-wiping her and turn her into a ninja puppet would be non-trivial. Not worth the TYS points we'd get. And I doubt the rest of the clan would react well to that.

I don't think we can get her back to functional AND healthy any time soon. But, I don't think we are at the stage of threat assessment/removal, and while some paranoia when dealing with Jonin is always warranted, that sort of adversarial thinking seems like it will lead the interaction in that direction.


[X] Action Plan: Holding an Intervention

(I've got nothing to contribute, other than suggesting a non-ninja therapy dog instead of a ninja therapy dog. Fewer hoops to jump though (possibly literally, depending on their training regime).)
 
Evenstar said:
I worry that this might be seen as us sniffing around at another clan's secrets, but otherwise I think this is brilliant. The master/pet relationship would serve as a better social model than the handler/asset relationship Mari currently patterns most of her behaviour around.

Yes, I do think Mari's literally been trained to treat people worse than dogs.



Thanks, this is all good stuff and will be factored in once I finish my exam.



All of these feel like good ideas that ought to belong in the plan to some degree.

@TarzanNn, @Lailoken: You're getting way too deep into the ninja mindset, IMO. Dismissing Mari as "broken" and therefore no longer valuable is the exact same kind of thought process that leads to the deep, deep stupidity of "skinwastes", "mudfoots" and "softfoots".

As the meme goes,
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I'm saying she's not broken, because she's dead. What she is now is her entirety. There's nothing else left to fix. She's back to where she was at the beginning of the story. All the character growth since then is gone forever. New growth is potentially possible, but it will be entirely new growth by a new character with only as much in common with the dead Mari everybody misses as she had with chapter one Mari.
 
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Lailoken said:
I'm saying she's not broken, because she's dead. What she is now is her entirety. There's nothing else left to fix. She's back to where she was at the beginning of the story. All the character growth since then is gone forever. New growth is potentially possible, but it will be entirely new growth by a new character with only as much in common with the dead Mari everybody misses as she had with chapter one Mari.
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Nah, that is absolutely incorrect. Has she backslid? Absolutely. But unless you're saying she's literally erased years of her life history, there's still some pretty significant hope.

Edit: Keep in mind: if she clawed her way out once, that means she's left handholds behind for a second time.
 
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Evenstar said:
Nah, that is absolutely incorrect. Has she backslid? Absolutely. But unless you're saying she's literally erased years of her life history, there's still some pretty significant hope.

Edit: Keep in mind: if she clawed her way out once, that means she's left handholds behind for a second time.
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I mean, I'm not putting it past her to have erased years of her life history. Coward's price, and all...
 
[X] Evenstar

@Evenstar You have my trust as a Councillor and you definitely have my trust on this.

P.S.: Would there be any value in acting as a confessional for Mari, at least when it comes to all the things she did for Goketsu that she herself considers morally questionable, or in other words, everything Hazō has explicitly accepted full moral responsibility for.
I do want that information also for our own sake since I consider that you can't really hold full moral responsibility for things you don't know about, but I don't want this enough to obtain it in a way detrimental to Mari.
 
faflec said:
So...my current plan has us discussion the situation with the rest of clan (sans Mari, obviously) and going to Mari with an optimized intervention (basically my plan, plus or minus whatever the others think would be a good idea). I'm not entirely sure we should be going off doing delicate things like this without at least consulting someone, but now I'm not sure.

Would it be possible for you to expand on your thoughts?
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Mari was just send away for 2 hours to "think" about what she just did, making any plan with the clan before her return and getting her answer is a bad idea, might push her away from Hazou/Goketsu in general. Mari doesn't really deserve that much distrust, just because she possible went to far one time.

We should first have a 1 on 1 with her and if Hazou and Mari don't see eye to eye with each other we can bring the rest in or just do it anyway afterwards, with her being willing.

faflec said:
She absolutely went too far, though.
  • Before-Mari was playful, never sadistic.
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She was always sadistic, she just kept it limited, especially towards us, now she basically got a playground for it, Genjutsu aren't that damaging (as we can see Hazou didn't even get a TYS)

I am still questioning if she really did go to far anyway? Hazou is supposed to getting used to this stuff and notice when it influences his perception of reality. Mari's primary mistake was that she seemed to have to much fun and that she didn't even try to teach Hazou afterwards.

Hazou just wasn't prepared to deal with this and failed. So yeah, he was emotional and yelled at Mari.
 
ContextBot said:
Mari was just send away for 2 hours to "think" about what she just did, making any plan with the clan before her return and getting her answer is a bad idea, might push her away from Hazou/Goketsu in general. Mari doesn't really deserve that much distrust, just because she possible went to far one time.

We should first have a 1 on 1 with her and if Hazou and Mari don't see eye to eye with each other we can bring the rest in or just do it anyway afterwards, with her being willing.



She was always sadistic, she just kept it limited, especially towards us, now she basically got a playground for it, Genjutsu aren't that damaging (as we can see Hazou didn't even get a TYS)

I am still questioning if she really did go to far anyway? Hazou is supposed to getting used to this stuff and notice when it influences his perception of reality. Mari's primary mistake was that she seemed to have to much fun and that she didn't even try to teach Hazou afterwards.

Hazou just wasn't prepared to deal with this and failed. So yeah, he was emotional and yelled at Mari.
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What Mari was doing was essentially rules lawyering imo.

She technically did what we asked, but it ended up being overall pointless for the intended purpose of the exercise.
Hazou gets a spooky sequence about Oro coming and being the shit out of his family and some of our first reactions (as well as Hazou's) were "this can't be real, we should dispel".

While we may have thought it was real because of the format of the update for awhile, Hazou immediately dispels after it happens and is rightfully upset. This wasn't some way to test his grip on reality; to help him determine what is real and what isn't. All Mari is doing (if there is any reason for what she's doing besides sadism) is teaching Hazou to dispel when faced with great trauma.
 
Just a reminder if you vote for a person. Depending on your settings it'll either count as the last plan that person voted for, or all the plans that person voted for.
 
Raichu1972 said:
What Mari was doing was essentially rules lawyering imo.

She technically did what we asked, but it ended up being overall pointless for the intended purpose of the exercise.
Hazou gets a spooky sequence about Oro coming and being the shit out of his family and some of our first reactions (as well as Hazou's) were "this can't be real, we should dispel".

While we may have thought it was real because of the format of the update for awhile, Hazou immediately dispels after it happens and is rightfully upset. This wasn't some way to test his grip on reality; to help him determine what is real and what isn't. All Mari is doing (if there is any reason for what she's doing besides sadism) is teaching Hazou to dispel when faced with great trauma.
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He could have dispelled earlier, when Oro first showed up, or when pointed out that some obscure law exists.

Hazou does need to learn to deal with those situation, especially when it comes to OUT stuff. Keiko, Ami and Kagome have multiple times pointed out that they might put him into a caldera just to be sure.

But we can just ask Mari what the point of the exercise was anyway, if she had a goal or was just messing around. That would actually tell us wahts going on inside her head.

Edit: What I am trying to say is that if Mari has an actual goal with this training than she probably tries to teach him to stay calm under stress and figure out whats going on, Mari doesn't really know much about the OUT so she does that. One of Ami's tips was to learn to try to check with multiple senses and figure out whats going on.

Again Mari is trained in this field, by Mist's goverment, for all we know, that was her training and she considers this somewhat normal for training.
 
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People who voted for faflec's plan who want Evenstar's plan might wish to unvote to make it easier to switch. Although of course that risks the possibility of a third plan winning as well.
 
Thought: If she see's this as us looking for a way to increase her utility, I think she'd see us pointing out that she failed to do what was asked and deliberately so would only entrench her further.
 
Due to the exigencies of Real Life, @eaglejarl and I will be swapping updates this week. Voting will close as normal for the current plan. On Friday, eaglejarl will write the interviews with the adoption candidates, and on Sunday, I will write the current plan, presumably the Mari intervention.

In practical terms, none of the above will affect you in any way.

Edit: Except insofar as I will be writing (presumably) the Mari intervention right after eaglejarl raised the bar for cruelty to the players. But I would never let that bias my work.
 
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roobee said:
People who voted for faflec's plan who want Evenstar's plan might wish to unvote to make it easier to switch. Although of course that risks the possibility of a third plan winning as well.
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I express confusion regarding this statement, as from my perspective @Evenstar has not made a plan and I have deliberately altered my plan such that it almost completely matches her thoughts as she has outlined.
 
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