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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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[X] Be apologectic for letting Madoka find about it this way, but reassuring that we've got things under control.
[X] Yes. It's called Walpurgisnacht, and it's on the scale of a natural disaster.
-[X] Between the abilities our group has, we can probably kill it without many issues - we've got us providing infinite magic, Mami Tomoe, and Homura as a major force multiplier. And we've got high hopes for Sayaka.
-[X] The problem would be the collateral damage. With our Grief powers, we could kill Walpurgisnacht alone, but the damage to the city would be considerable.
-[X] Homura's taken care that the city will be evacuated before the fight, but you want Mitakihara intact. If possible, you want to kill Walpurgis before it even gets here. That means we need more help, and... the kind of magical girls that would turn up for this? Those are the kind of people we want to support the most.
 
The Narrator said:
Again, it's not a good idea to make Madoka think that her hometown is in danger of being destroyed unless we can get enough girls to join us. It might get her thinking that her contract could make the difference between keeping or losing her home.
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[] Between Mami Tomoe and Homura Akemi, we have enough technical skill to take down Walpurghis with two packs of trick gum and some duct tape, and between ourself and Sayaka we have the raw power to literally blow up the planet - Killing Wally won't be the problem.
-[] We mostly want to use this as an opportunity to foster some better connections with the larger world and as an opportunity to build trust and friendship on a wider scale than has been possible before. And even if that fails, having more Magical Girls in the area can only help keep Walpurghis contained and not wrecking downtown Mitakihara - Homura's evacuated the city, and if anybody is dumb enough to stay behind then we can get them out of here with no problems, but the property damage could be excessive if Walpurghis is tougher than we think, so overkill is preferred to underkill.

How about that? Downplays the property damage without really hiding anything. Madoka's already been talked to about how basically everyone doesn't want her to contract, so hopefully this will keep us until the gretchenbomb. And if we want more security, we can talk to Madoka later, in private, and confide in her our plans for Batdoka or even witch and gretchenbomb her if that's what the thread wills.
 
You know what? This vote is impossible. This is all so dependent on Madoka's reaction to whatever we say that attempting to plan past the first sentence is a terrible idea and will never work.

[x] Apologize to Madoka for the way you phrased that.
[x] Impress upon Madoka:
-[x] Walpy is fucking dead. The people are going to be safe and the city will be too.
-[x] This is mostly social-fu: filter out girls that're insufficiently idealistic, build community among the girls that do come. Killing Walpy faster is two birds with one stone.
-[x] If Madoka shows any sign of considering contracting, shut it down. It wouldn't help in this situation, and even if it did, it wouldn't be worth it.
 
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Vebyast said:
[x] Apologize to Madoka for the way you phrased that.
[x] Impress upon Madoka:
-[x] Walpy is fucking dead. The people are going to be safe and the city will be too.
-[x] This is mostly social-fu: filter out girls that're insufficiently idealistic, build community among the girls that do come. Killing Walpy faster is two birds with one stone.
-[x] If Madoka shows any sign of considering contracting, shut it down. It wouldn't help in this situation.
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Isn't that basically my vote, but shorter and with more swearing?
 
The Narrator said:
Isn't that basically my vote, but shorter and with more swearing?
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Not at all. You're still specify words to speak, which means you can't deal with variations in Madoka's reaction to convey intent instead of specific words. Everybody in this entire thread agrees on precisely what we want to convey to Madoka, you're just all fighting about the words to use in the second half of the vote because you're not sitting there to see how she reacts to the first half of the vote.
 
Vebyast said:
Everybody in this entire thread agrees on precisely what we want to convey to Madoka...
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Not really. The other bandwagon wants to tell Madoka that we need more magical girls to prevent property damage and keep the city intact. I've been trying to convince them that doing that risks giving her a reason to contract.

Fuck it, close enough.

[x] Vebyast
 
I'll vote for whatever you want if we go into a timestop after this and loop-bomb madoka w/ full explanation of why we don't want her to contract. But somebody had damn well better guarantee that we'll do it.

Because this vote is a damn joke at this point. People are freaking out over things being contract bait, people are asserting that things are anti-contract while others call them contract bait, it's ridiculous. And all because we didn't perfectly plan to the letter a single damn vote.
 
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The Narrator said:
Not really. The other bandwagon wants to tell Madoka that we need more magical girls to prevent property damage and keep the city intact. I've been trying to convince them that doing that risks giving her a reason to contract.
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"Convey to Madoka" means "what we want Madoka to take away from this". Which everybody agrees on, they're just disagreeing on the details - what words to use.

Anyway, just realized that we had mentioned Walpurgisnacht to Bennouna, so we can use everybody's nonplussed reactions to it to help frame things - this isn't something that the magical girls freak out about, it's just another topic.

[x] Apologize to Madoka for the way you phrased that.
[x] Impress upon Madoka and Bennouna:
-[x] That Walpurgisnacht Bennouna mentioned is effectively a small natural disaster.
-[x] Walpy is fucking dead. The people are going to be safe and the city will be too.
-[x] This is mostly social-fu: filter out girls that're insufficiently idealistic, build community among the girls that do come. Killing Walpy faster is two birds with one stone.
-[x] If Madoka shows any sign of considering contracting, shut it down. It wouldn't help in this situation, and even if it did, it wouldn't be worth it.

Kaizuki said:
I'll vote for whatever you want if we go into a timestop after this and loop-bomb madoka w/ full explanation of why we don't want her to contract.
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Do we think that Homura is ready?
 
[X] Vebyast

I always feel like an idiot in this thread because I care about what happens and can voice my opinion, but my opinion is so often expressed more eloquently and thoughtfully than I can before I ever get the chance to sit down and type. Like, I took a nap because I was exhausted and didn't sleep well, and I get up planning to boil down my thoughts to intent and get them settled into a vote only to find that Vebyast has done so literally minutes before I got up.

It's incredibly frustrating and occasionally demoralizing.

So I'm going to channel that frustration into a short radio drama script.

WPN: "Yo, nice city ya gots."

Mami: "Why thank you, my family and I've worked very hard to keep it clear of Witches. Who are you, stranger?"

WPN: "Me? Nah, nah, nobody for yas to worry about. Ah'm just passin' through."

Mami: "Alright, be sure to visit the tea house downtown, it's got a wonderful view of the avenue and an excellent ginseng blend, my girlfriend swears by it. She said she was going to take me by there tonight, actually, though she seemed sort of nervous for some reason..."

WPN: "Ah'll be sure ta do dat."

*Five Minutes Later*

WPN: "Lookit me, ah'm jugglin' buildin's!"

Sabrina: "Is that our tea shop? Wrong neighborhood, motherfucker."

*Sounds of violence, suddenly stopping with a cat yowl at the 3 second mark.*

Madoka, breathless: "I heard the commotion and got here as fast as I could! I can...Sabrina, are you rolling that poor Witch for her Grief? We've told you and told you, just put the poor things out of their misery!"

Sabrina: "But...but...tea shop...Mami...and the ring...and I was gonna...argh. Fine, mom."

Madoka: "Don't you take that tone with me, young lady. Now kill the Witch and start fixing the city before poor Mami sees it. Heavens, what a mess!"

*This episode of Sabrina's Wonderful Witchy Adventures was brought to you by our sponsors at...*
 
Kaizuki said:
I'll vote for whatever you want if we go into a timestop after this and loop-bomb madoka w/ full explanation of why we don't want her to contract. But somebody had damn well better guarantee that we'll do it.
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I absolutely want us to do that as soon as possible. Maybe even as soon as we finish this conversation. Hell, I wanted to do that last night.

Vebyast said:
Do we think that Homura is ready?
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If Homura doesn't want Madoka to contract, then she better get ready. Keeping Madoka ignorant of the consequences of her contract only helps Kyubey.

If we don't want to expose Madoka to the witchbomb (because I know a lot of people are extremely reluctant to do so), then it should still be possible to apocalypsebomb while withholding the details.

"There are negative side-effects to contracting. Not just to the girl that makes the wish, but to everything around her. A sort of a karmic backlash. For a girl with a normal potential, the damage can be contained, but with your huge potential... the world wouldn't survive. And Kyubey doesn't care. He gains some power from each contract, and the profit he'll get from yours is enough for him to retire on, so it doesn't matter to him if humanity goes extinct as long as he gets his."
 
Vebyast said:
Do we think that Homura is ready?
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At this point? It's not about whether she's ready or not, we'll do the talking if it comes to it.

It's about this -- the current setup -- being disgusting and intolerable. Who was it -- somebody said something about Homura's strategy of preventing Madocontracts being to intervene constantly? Because that's what it was, she made a bunch of semi-vague statements, tried to convince Madoka it was for her own safety, intervenes whenever she feels Madoka is thinking about it, yadda yadda yadda.

*throws up hands*

Guess what guys, we're not doing all that much differently here! And you know what the result is? Just like Homura, the moment we find ourselves in a situation where it might even appear to Madoka that we "need help" we start losing our head over things being "contract bait." That's not stable.

Explain that Homura is a timetraveller who has been trying and failing to save Madoka's life. Leave out most of the details. And at the end of it, assert that whether or not to contract is her choice, but it will hurt Homura to see it happen.

The alternative -- the only alternative, however much we dilute it -- is to keep doing this damn social dance and eventually something goes wrong.

The Narrator said:
"There are negative side-effects to contracting. Not just to the girl that makes the wish, but to everything around her. A sort of a karmic backlash. For a girl with a normal potential, the damage can be contained, but with your huge potential... the world wouldn't survive. And Kyubey doesn't care. He gains some power from each contract, and the profit he'll get from yours is enough for him to retire on, so it doesn't matter to him if humanity goes extinct as long as he gets his."
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I'm so fed up with this whole thing. Why are we against Madoka contracting? Because Homura is a poor traumatized superhero-waif who just wants her love interest to not die or contract for once in her ten years of hell. Gretchen, whatever, we'd just stick a damn seed to Madoka's gem. But it would crush Homura. We don't need Madoka to contract in order to make a better world, and we don't need her to not contract in order to prevent KG. Homura, however, needs Madoka not to contract for the health of her own damn soul.

And until we up and )(*#@@#%$ tell madoka that, this sort of situation is going to happen semi-regularly. Because Madoka will just make her damn canon wish is the risk of telling her about Gretchen. Nothing solves the contract issue except making Madoka honestly not want to contract. And the only way to do that is to make it clear to her that contracting will hurt her friends, in a way that precludes her from wishing to protect them.

In other words, )(**$)#*@((# explaining Homura.

Don't mind the censored profanity I'm tired and annoyed.
 
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I'm not just keeping Madoka from contracting for Homura's sake. I don't want the world to end, and I don't want to take the chance that we won't be able to keep Madoka's gem clean. For whatever reason, she seems to witch out abnormally quickly after contracting from Loop 4 onward.

I think that "don't destroy the world" makes for a more compelling argument than "don't make Homura sad." If lives get put in danger, then Madoka might decide that a sad Homura is better than a dead Homura (that's what she did at the end of the series, after all), but if she knows that wishing will kill whoever she's trying to save anyway then there's no reason for her to ever do it.

Of course, there's no reason that we can't do both. Revealing that Homura came back in time establishes that we're not just theorizing about the world-ending consequences: we know it will happen because it did happen in the future. And it gives it a personal resonance. But it's not enough to keep her from contracting by itself. Not if Kyubey arranges to put the lives of one of her loved ones in danger. If she's weighing "Homura will be sad" against "my baby brother will die", which one do you think she'll pick?
 
Futurevote snippet, after we finish talking with Bennouna, before we head off to do rounds. Maybe before Enchantment practice, using Kyubey as an excuse?

[] Pull Homura aside, go private.
-[] Apologize for bringing Walpurgisnacht up to Madoka like that. With Kyubey interfering again you're having to accelerate your schedule.
-[] Warn Homura that Kyubey has an infohazard for her. It's bad, but Homura can get through it as long as she has friends there to help her and Kyubey doesn't get to twist things around to make it all seem worse than it is.
-[] You want to preempt Kyubey. Sooner rather than later. Madoka needs to be there too, and it should guarantee she never contracts.
-[] If Kyubey attempts to communicate, do not take chances. Homura should timestop immediately and come to get you.
 
Kaizuki said:
Strawman. That's an obvious issue that has been addressed since time immemorial.
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How so?

While we don't know of any instance in which Kyubey endangered Madoka's family, we do know that he deliberately endangered Sayaka in Episode 5 to try to get Madoka to contract to save her. And it would have worked if Homura had not intervened at the last moment. Are we going to depend on Homura being there every time?

As for Madoka being unwilling to contract knowing that it would hurt Homura, that is also disproven by the series itself. Homura makes it pretty clear how much she doesn't want Madoka to contract in Episode 11, and it doesn't stop Madoka from going through with it in Episode 12.

Madoka is willing to make a contract to save another, even if that will make people who love her sad. The best way to prevent that is to make her aware that if she does that, she won't actually save anyone, because they'll die anyway when the world ends. Even Madoka can't possible fail to grasp how meaningless that would make her sacrifice.

And again, why settle for one when you can do both? Tell her the world will be destroyed and how much Homura sacrificed for her. Get her in the mind and the heart.
 
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*pinches bridge of nose*

Human decisionmaking is relative. We weigh pros and cons and decide on a path.

Madoka wants her family and friends to be safe and happy. She contracts, primarily, when the former is endangered beyond a certain point. That point is determined by the relative consequences. She doesn't care if it hurts Homura to see her contract when Homura is getting fucking killed, and you'll never change that, no matter how much you try: If someone tells me that it's wrong to hope, I'll tell them they're wrong every time. When her friends are dying before her eyes, contracting is the only hope. The only way to prevent her from contracting under those circumstances is to prevent them from coming about, because that is always going to be past the point, even if you try to tell her that it'll end the world. After all, Kyubey himself told her she'd become the greatest of witches in the primary canon loop.

This is why I called your argument a strawman when you brought up the idea of Tatsuya being used as a hostage. Because to convince her not to contract in similar circumstances is impossible or nearly so. Far easier to simply prevent that from happening.

The issue at hand -- very different from what you were talking about, which is why I dismissed your earlier post in its role as a response to me -- is that we're worrying about her contracting outside of those sorts of circumstances. Which partly explaining Homura's story is absoutely crucial to preventing. It moves the point far, far off.
 
The Narrator said:
While we don't know of any instance in which Kyubey endangered Madoka's family, we do know that he deliberately endangered Sayaka in Episode 5 to try to get Madoka to contract to save her.
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Invalid comparison: Madoka didn't have any allies or options in Ep5. Contracting looked like the only solution she had. That is not the case right now.

Also, I thought that we were planning on telling Madoka everything all the way up to Gretchen. I don't see any way to not tell her that, in fact, if we're potentialbombing Homura with her there. So I'm not really sure how this is an argument in the first place. If anything, the thing to be arguing against is the idea that Madoka would be fine only being given the Witchbomb and not the Potentialbomb, since that's the only real alternative to doing both.
 
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