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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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Kaizuki said:
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.
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He did, although he stopped short of explaining that it would be world-destroyingly bad. And after the witchbomb Madoka didn't even consider making a wish until she found one that would prevent her own witch from existing and neutralize the danger. Not even to try to bring Sayaka back after she'd witched out and died. That implies that Madoka was not willing to risk unleashing her witch on the world to save a single life, even of her best friend.

You say that there would be no way to keep Madoka from contracting to save a loved one, but if she knew that contracting would kill that person anyway, along with everyone else, then there would be no point in doing so. That's a con that outweighs all pros. Which means that there would also be no point in trying to use that tactic against her. Kyubey doesn't do pointless things, so that would prevent hostage-taking from becoming an issue.

Do you really think that, if Madoka were told that her making a wish will destroy the world, she'd do it anyway? She's not Ikari Shinji.

If we can prevent any such situations from ever arising, that's great. But what if we can't? What if while we're trying to fix things, Madoka gets worried or impatient and decides to try fixing it herself with a wish? If we keep her ignorant of the consequences, then she has no reason not to.

What reason do you have to not tell her? What does that accomplish? You're worried that she might make the Madokami wish? I already described a way we can explain the danger while withholding the crucial detail, but she's not going to avoid knowing about the witchbomb forever. She's far more likely to wish if she doesn't know about it.


Vebyast said:
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.
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Don't ask me, pal. Kaizuki is the one who's insisting that we not tell her.
 
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Vebyast said:
Er. I actually got the impression that Kai wanted to tell Madoka a reduced version now as a prelude to the whole thing, not that we should stop there. We do need to deal with Homura too, after all.
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That's not the impression I got from this post:
Kaizuki said:
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.
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I've already tried saying more than once that we can easily tell Madoka that her wish will destroy the world and everything that Homura has done to save her, and Kai didn't respond with "Duh! That's what I meant," so....
 
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The Narrator said:
I've already tried saying more than once that we can easily tell Madoka that her wish will destroy the world and everything that Homura has done to save her, and Kai didn't respond with "Duh! That's what I meant," so....
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Kaizuki is not sure one way or the other, but doesn't feel that going over the entire thing is productive at this current time since it will take a while to do so. Later?
 
Vebyast said:
-[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.
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Can we try removing the swear words and memes from this? Something like:

[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 dead. The people are going to be safe and the city will be too. Emphasize that you have good reasons to think this, but some of those reasons are probably best kept private for now.
-[x] You are asking partly out of an overabundance of caution, but also as a pretext for making connections for the future: 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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Even without those changes, though, I like how flexible this vote is, so:

[X] Vebyast
 
The Narrator said:
A thought I've had on this for quite some time: a meguca's power output scales with potential, but does the grief capacity of her soul gem? It's possible that Madoka is drawing godlike voltage, but with only a human-sized capacitor, so she immediately blows a fuse.
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That is possible, I suppose, but Sabrina is a clear counter-example to that hypothesis. She is immensely powerful, and although we've never directly measured her capacity, it definitely isn't being drained very quickly. Heck, even Homura is a counter-example. Her power is bullshit-tier, but it still only drains her soul gem at a (comparatively) reasonable rate. The only girl we know whose magic really eats up her soul gem capacity quickly is Sayaka, and that appears to be an issue of non-native powers being more draining rather than Sayaka's power being intrinsically draining in and of itself.

Marcus.D.Basterd said:
Speeking of the whole "apocalypsebomb" thing: If we manage to get the whole "manage to get Witches to be sane-ish" idea could we just manage to set off Madoka safely? And off planet?
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Probably not. Even if we can get Witches to be sane-ish, they're still reality warping monstrosities rather than their former selves (and who knows if they keep their memories of their former lives?). We would need to be able to completely reverse witching for that to be an option. And even then, the trauma inherent in the experience would make it an option of last resort.

Kaizuki said:
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.
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I agree that Homura is rather irrational on this subject. But Sabrina still has plenty of reasons of her own to prevent Madoka from contracting. If Madoka does contract, Kyuubey will want her to witchout (eventually), so simply sticking a seed to her gem would merely be a stopgap measure. It could be a stopgap measure that would last for a very long time, but eventually the protective measures would fail and Earth would pay the price. Almost any other girl could witchout and that witch could be dealt with, but Kriemhild Gretchen would mean the end of humanity (at least). So Madoka absolutely cannot be allowed to make a contract unless her wish includes (at the very least) a caveat to prevent her from ever witching out. Or to prevent her witch from killing everything (she could wish that all Witches would be sane and not kill humans, for instance).

The Narrator said:
This line worries me, because it still implies to Madoka that we need more girls to help us if she doesn't want her home to be destroyed. That's a pretty big motivation for her to join up.
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Madoka isn't a lemming. She wouldn't make such a wish on the spur of the moment; as in canon, now that Madoka has been made aware of some of the serious consequences of a wish, she will be hesitant to make a wish until she has to. And in the meantime, she will first discuss her options with other people, and one of the first people she will probably talk to is Sabrina.

Vebyast said:
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.
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Madoka is reasonable and willing to wait for us to fully explain everything. The person whose reaction we should be worrying about is Homura. Too little confidence in our ability to deal with Walpurgisnacht and she will worry about Madoka contracting. Too much confidence and she will worry that we aren't taking Walpurgisnacht seriously and that we won't put the effort in to recruit other girls to help fight it.
 
On the subject of being full of brag about Walpy:

Was browsing the internet, and came across these. Don't know if they've been on the thread yet.


 
Kaizuki said:
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.
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boonerunner said:
I agree that Homura is rather irrational on this subject.
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Ah yes, Homura trying her best to prevent Madoka from contracting after a past Madoka explicitly asked her to stop Kyubey from contracting her is so irrational. Clearly Homura should just abandon that promise and embrace the fact of Madoka being a free ticket to a super-wish that can fix all the world's problems.

She's not going to ignore that promise that she made to Madoka. She will never abandon it because that would not only invalidate everything she's been attempting to do, but it would outright invalidate the sacrifice that timeline's Madoka made when she used Oktavia's Grief Seed on Homura and not herself.
 
Madoka can't contract because it would be boring. She solves everything, we siphon out her grief constantly, and that's it. No challenge left, no quest left. Everything else is just in-character justification.
 
JarringToaster said:
Ah yes, Homura trying her best to prevent Madoka from contracting after a past Madoka explicitly asked her to stop Kyubey from contracting her is so irrational. Clearly Homura should just abandon that promise and embrace the fact of Madoka being a free ticket to a super-wish that can fix all the world's problems.

She's not going to ignore that promise that she made to Madoka. She will never abandon it because that would not only invalidate everything she's been attempting to do, but it would outright invalidate the sacrifice that timeline's Madoka made when she used Oktavia's Grief Seed on Homura and not herself.
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It kind of doesn't matter if Homura is justified in her goals or not; she's older than anyone else in the cast and isn't going to change her mind any time soon, so we have to live with what we have.

The more pertinent issue, one that some of us have been adamant about for some time now, is that we have two issues that are better addressed sooner rather than later:
  • Madoka has been given no reason not to Contract other than the rather flimsy promise we extracted out of her when we Lichbombed her and Sayaka, and Sayaka's Contract has only made that promise even flimsier, since obviously we haven't punished the blueberry much for going back on her word.
  • Homura has not been Potential-bombed, leaving open an easy avenue for Kyubey to temporarily neutralize one of our strongest allies.
Now, we can cut both of these off with a single time-stopped conversation; we just need to muster up the votes to actually do it:
  • Pull Madoka and Homura into a time-stopped conversation. We can probably do this without Mami, since we've meta-bombed her and she now knows there's things we know that frankly we shouldn't, that nobody should know except the people directly involved. We tell her we'll be back literally instantaneously, and we do it.
  • Sit Madoka and Homura down, and give Madoka the Cliff Notes of Homura's life, the heavily sanitized version that doesn't include a Witchbomb. Maybe even do it with visual aids, although that would suck for Homura. We show how Madoka dies every time she Contracts, and how desperate Homura is to fulfill her promise to Madoka.
    • Addendum to this: if we show nothing else, we definitely show Madoka a picture of glasses-Homura; if that doesn't make Madoka fall for her then nothing will.
  • Move from there to the Apocalypse-bomb, Witchbomb-free edition. Note how Madoka's Potential is monotonically increasing, and that at this point the inescapable result of her Wishing is the destruction of Earth, and how Kyubey is actively trying to maneuver events such that she does Contract, because the benefits it receives from her Contract are enough that he does not care that the rest of Earth is doomed by it.
  • Wrap things up with the Potential-bomb, but do it gently, and talk through the implications with Homura. Yes, it's her fault that Madoka's Potential is now too large for the Earth to survive her Contracting, but frankly that doesn't really since she promised Madoka not to let Madoka Contract anyway, and she has an eternity to make that Wish come true.
  • The two of them will probably have a lot to talk about and making out crying to do at this point, so we can leave them to it while we head out to our cleansing trip. Point out that Homura now has a Clear Seed and the leftovers from the picnic, so the two of them could spend all day making out talking, safely in time stop, then go on a date hang out while we're taking the peanut gallery out of town.
 
boonerunner said:
That is possible, I suppose, but Sabrina is a clear counter-example to that hypothesis. She is immensely powerful, and although we've never directly measured her capacity, it definitely isn't being drained very quickly.
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Sabrina's potent and all, but doesn't seem to be on the scale of something like Madokami, at least in terms of raw power consumption. I suspect that if Madoka wished for griefbending, her control radius would be a lot bigger than 100 meters. (We're also really fastidious about keeping our gem clean.) Really, no magical girl, no matter how powerful, has even had anything on par with the potential that Madoka is slinging around.

It's possible that power output grows with potential at a slightly faster exponential rate than gem capacity, and when taken to such extreme levels ends up vastly outpacing it. Hell, that's the sort of design flaw that the Incubators might include on purpose to encourage to most powerful girls to witch out sooner.

If there isn't something like that in play, then it's weird that Madoka starts witching out so quickly after the first few loops. She doesn't seem to be particularly miserable in Loop 4 or anything.


JarringToaster said:
Ah yes, Homura trying her best to prevent Madoka from contracting after a past Madoka explicitly asked her to stop Kyubey from contracting her is so irrational. Clearly Homura should just abandon that promise and embrace the fact of Madoka being a free ticket to a super-wish that can fix all the world's problems.
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It's not that Homura's goal is irrational; it's our goal, too. It's that she can get a little irrational on the subject. She's been known to overreact just a tad. And her default approach can be a little... iffy. She insists on trying to do everything herself and pulling the Mysterious Stranger act, and ends up making everyone distrust her and shooting herself in the foot right out of the gate. She doesn't trust Madoka with the information that she needs to realize for herself that contracting is a bad idea.


FelOnyx said:
Madoka can't contract because it would be boring. She solves everything, we siphon out her grief constantly, and that's it. No challenge left, no quest left. Everything else is just in-character justification.
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o_O This is a roleplaying game. In-character motivations are the ones that matter.

If Madoka contracts, the world is destroyed. We lose. Game over. In and out of character.
 
Literally the only thing that will ever make Madoka not contract is for her to totally understand Homura's circumstances, judging by all official materials. If A) Homura makes a dying wish after using her life to stop Walpurgis, or B) Homura Golden Ends and beats Wally with all the girls alive and well, Madoka will promise not to contract and honor it.

Madoka needs to know that her contract is killing Homura's soul. Anything less and she simply Rules Lawyers into Godhood to fix all problems she sees as a priority.
 
The Narrator said:
Sabrina's potent and all, but doesn't seem to be on the scale of something like Madokami, at least in terms of raw power consumption. I suspect that if Madoka wished for griefbending, her control radius would be a lot bigger than 100 meters. (We're also really fastidious about keeping our gem clean.) Really, no magical girl, no matter how powerful, has even had anything on par with the potential that Madoka is slinging around.
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Word of God says that Sabrina is slinging around Madoka-tier levels of potential. Only reason we aren't Sabrinael is because our wish wasn't of a sort that'd grant Godhood :V
 
AuraTwilight said:
Literally the only thing that will ever make Madoka not contract is for her to totally understand Homura's circumstances, judging by all official materials. If A) Homura makes a dying wish after using her life to stop Walpurgis, or B) Homura Golden Ends and beats Wally with all the girls alive and well, Madoka will promise not to contract and honor it.

Madoka needs to know that her contract is killing Homura's soul. Anything less and she simply Rules Lawyers into Godhood to fix all problems she sees as a priority.
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Two problems with that theory:

1.) Those are the two endings from the game that we know absolutely cannot be canon, since if they were Homura would not be here now.

2.) We have examples of times where Madoka did know what Homura had done for her and contracted anyway, like the end of the series and Homura's Revenge (which is not canon, but you like referring to it). So clearly that's not sufficient inducement.

If you're concerned that Madoka will try to Rules Lawyer her way around the apocalypse, then just tell her that it won't work. That in a hundred loops, she's never found a wish that didn't backfire horribly. (Even with the Madokami wish, we wound up with Rebellion, so I don't consider that a lie.) Convince her that it's not worth the risk. Tell her that Homura won't stand for it and will keep resetting time. I've never said that we shouldn't tell her what Homura did for her, just that we need to also tell her that she'll cause the end of the world. Because Madoka has shown that she is willing to break Homura's heart if lives are at stake.

I get the impression that she pretty much always has no clue that her wish can have apocalyptic consequences (and you argued previously that Kyubey doesn't even know, so you can't claim that the "worst of all witches" comment should tip her off if he's supposedly clueless), so for all we know that would enough of a disincentive to stop her from ever doing it. Madoka's presumably sane and would not take risks with the fate of the world.
 
boonerunner said:
Probably not. Even if we can get Witches to be sane-ish, they're still reality warping monstrosities rather than their former selves (and who knows if they keep their memories of their former lives?). We would need to be able to completely reverse witching for that to be an option. And even then, the trauma inherent in the experience would make it an option of last resort.
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I am basically trying to find the minimum functionality for a course of action. I was assuming that that would be "Madoka, in a acceptable form of sanity", but even that wouldn't be easy to have. Though i don't think that it would need to be a perfect reversal. As long as she is Madoka the option is there, even if it isn't the best option it is there if no other option is.
 
boonerunner said:
So Madoka absolutely cannot be allowed to make a contract unless her wish includes (at the very least) a caveat to prevent her from ever witching out. Or to prevent her witch from killing everything (she could wish that all Witches would be sane and not kill humans, for instance).
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"I wish that all magical girls everywhere no longer accumulated grief or corruption in their soul gems."

If you're going to consider going down that route, then you might as well cut the problem off at the source.
 
defenestrator said:
Wouldn't that shut down all megucas' magical abilities too? (which may or may not include maintaining their meat puppets)
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No reason it would. The wish doesn't say that they lose their magic, just that corruption doesn't accumulate. Meguca wishes don't usually do the monkeypaw thing. (Although one could specify that in the wording if one were concerned.)

They might start shedding clouds of grief around, however, since it's not staying in their gem.
 
The Narrator said:
No reason it would. The wish doesn't say that they lose their magic, just that corruption doesn't accumulate. Meguca wishes don't usually do the monkeypaw thing. (Although one could specify that in the wording if one were concerned.)

They might start shedding clouds of grief around, however, since it's not staying in their gem.
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And then you get Wraiths. But at least this time the girls just have to fight them, with no reliance on cubes or anything to purify. Kinda like a traditional magical girl show, actually.
 
The Narrator said:
No reason it would. The wish doesn't say that they lose their magic, just that corruption doesn't accumulate. Meguca wishes don't usually do the monkeypaw thing. (Although one could specify that in the wording if one were concerned.)

They might start shedding clouds of grief around, however, since it's not staying in their gem.
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Wonder if coobs can build atmospheric grief scrubbers.
 
AuraTwilight said:
Literally the only thing that will ever make Madoka not contract is for her to totally understand Homura's circumstances, judging by all official materials. If A) Homura makes a dying wish after using her life to stop Walpurgis, or B) Homura Golden Ends and beats Wally with all the girls alive and well, Madoka will promise not to contract and honor it.

Madoka needs to know that her contract is killing Homura's soul. Anything less and she simply Rules Lawyers into Godhood to fix all problems she sees as a priority.
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So is that you, me, veb, and Redshirt so far? Cool.
 
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