Remove ads

Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

Reader mode
Mmm...

Hold on a second... Nezganrif is writing Homu Quest...?

But Nezganrif is writing Mumi Quest!

Does that mean... DOES IT MEAN NEZGANRIF IS ALSO WRITING SAKURA QUEST?!?!?!?!

:o:o:o

Oh, and Sabrina quest, too.
 
AuraTwilight said:
I've already posted several plausible ideas just a few pages ago on how "Madoka got the Potentialbomb instead" makes perfect sense, go read them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I read it, I was just too busy to comment at the time. I don't find it very probable, for the reasons already stated: doing so is more likely to harm his interests than help them. The more Madoka knows about the situation, the less willing she is to contract.
 
DB_Explorer said:
I'm sad and glad I am not memeable enough to be in these fake quests...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Man, I've been feeling kinda bad about all the people I couldn't include in the war room omake the other day.

There's just so many of us! And it's hard to pin down everyone's character in a way that'd fit a particular scene, too.


Anyway, onto the important thing:

[Q] Send Sabrina to her room.
 
Stupid clueless doggirls, nya. Too prone to panic, nyan. They don't understand the concept of hard decisions made by hard catgirls, nyah~
 
Is this non-sequiter day?

I forgot to bake bread.

Thread tax - Maybe Homura missed a loop. Could be that Madoka made a wish in a future Homura doesn't remember because it reset time without Homura being the cause and Homura remembers only what she would have at the start of the last loop she caused.
 
The Narrator said:
I read it, I was just too busy to comment at the time. I don't find it very probable, for the reasons already stated: doing so is more likely to harm his interests than help them. The more Madoka knows about the situation, the less willing she is to contract.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Except Kyubey thinks the exact opposite, because he literally gave her an info-dump on Incubators throughout history to pressure her.

Kyubey's understanding of the characters is imperfect. He understands Madoka's messiah complex and tries to attack her through her empathy, but he doesn't understand how this same personality trait can be inverted against him through Madoka understanding Homura's suffering. He simply thinks that "More People Who Hurt = The more Madoka will do something about it."

This is the same Incubator who didn't understand Madoka's mourning because new people are born every minute. He doesn't understand Madoka's value system.
 
In other words, while Kyuubey is very very practiced at manipulating people, the inner workings of human personality are still very much a black box for him.
 
But he does understand enough to know that potential contractees respond negatively to knowing the true nature of soul gems and the true origins of witches, and does his best to withhold that information. The history lesson and the talk about entropy both came after Madoka had already learned those horrible truths in a attempt to recast his horrible actions as something positive, and possibly to make her think that if she tried something clever like wishing the Incubators never existed, humanity would suffer as well. For someone who doesn't understand human emotions, he's pretty good at manipulating people, and knows how to avoid saying things that will discourage them.

And from the unemotional perspective, isn't telling her that Homura has done all this for her basically telling her that Homura is an ally? Doesn't that make her more likely to listen to Homura and align with her goals? Possibly start asking her some questions about the bad things that happened in previous loops that will make the risk/reward calculation on contracting even worse? If she knows that somebody came back in time from the future a hundred times to stop her from doing something, wouldn't most people take that a sign that they should reconsider?

And again, if Madoka knew about the potentialbomb, why did she make such a vague wish? When she knew about the threat of witches, she crafted her wish very carefully to neutralize that threat. She's pretty good at rules-lawyering when she actually knows the rules. If she knows about the loops and her rising potential, then why didn't she try something like, "I wish that Homura's next attempt would be a complete success" or "I wish that I'd never had a high potential"? Wishing for an undetermined deus ex machina to arise to fix things sounds like something said in desperation because she didn't know enough to form a workable solution on her own.
 
We're not sure what situation she wished in, though. It's possible it was spur-of-the-moment for some reason, like Sayaka/Homura/Kyouko/Mami was about to die and needed Doka's help right there. So she tried her hand at speed chess and managed to be successful but sloppy.

Or you're right and Madoka didn't actually know the whole situation. Either way, knowing more about the last loop will give us a clearer lens on the situation she wished under, and that will give us better insights.



So, besides that, we know we're wrong somewhere. Can we get a list of assumptions going so we can start verifying them one by one? Then we can start hypothesizing on how to disprove each one objectively until we find out what Firn is giggling about YES I HEAR YOU.
 
Assumption 2.22: Time is a linear measure of change in a system from a less entropic point to a higher entropic point. Time is a media player progression bar, and entropy is subject to the whims of Clarke-Tech aliens and Magical Girls alike.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Assumption One: The physical reality Sabrina percieves exists outside of her mind.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It exists in Firnagzen's mind, technically. :p

Assumption 1.5: The physical reality that Sabrina perceives is not actually a Witch's Barrier masquerading as reality.

Assumption √-1: The reality in which we are participants in a forum-based roleplay quest exists outside of our own minds.
 
The Narrator said:
But he does understand enough to know that potential contractees respond negatively to knowing the true nature of soul gems and the true origins of witches, and does his best to withhold that information. The history lesson and the talk about entropy both came after Madoka had already learned those horrible truths in a attempt to recast his horrible actions as something positive, and possibly to make her think that if she tried something clever like wishing the Incubators never existed, humanity would suffer as well. For someone who doesn't understand human emotions, he's pretty good at manipulating people, and knows how to avoid saying things that will discourage them.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Mm, that's not entirely true, that first point. He doesn't really do anything to withhold the information so much as doesn't provide it. If the truth comes out he doesn't act to suppress it at all, from what we've seen. When Madoka asks him if it's true, he goes "lol yea."

You're right that he gave those speeches to try to salvage Madoka's losing faith in his deal, but his timing matters. He waits to do it when the deadline for Walpurgis is almost upon her (else he could have done it before Sayaka's funeral, or whatever).

He drops those speeches because he's trying to appeal to her sense of morality and her need to be useful, things he understands to some degree. In a Potentialbomb scenario, he can still give her those talks, but the thesis is that he decided to inform her of the Potentialbomb either because A) Homura wasn't letting him talk to her through use of Desert Eagle and was planning to use Madoka to deliver it, or B) He was deliberately trying to use it to make Madoka contract with the thought of "If I tell Madoka the loops are hurting Homura, she'll make a wish to make the loops stop."

He demonstrably doesn't understand Madoka's talent for rules-lawyering or the way her sense of kindness actually works.

And from the unemotional perspective, isn't telling her that Homura has done all this for her basically telling her that Homura is an ally? Doesn't that make her more likely to listen to Homura and align with her goals? Possibly start asking her some questions about the bad things that happened in previous loops that will make the risk/reward calculation on contracting even worse? If she knows that somebody came back in time from the future a hundred times to stop her from doing something, wouldn't most people take that a sign that they should reconsider?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Madoka already knew Homura was an ally at that point in canon. Hell, she had absolute faith in Homura since before Mami died, as she personally witnessed Homura trying to spare Mami from being killed and was the only person in the series to have that context of her character.

As for the 'what if she asks questions' thing...well, see Sub-Thesis A above.

And again, if Madoka knew about the potentialbomb, why did she make such a vague wish? When she knew about the threat of witches, she crafted her wish very carefully to neutralize that threat. She's pretty good at rules-lawyering when she actually knows the rules. If she knows about the loops and her rising potential, then why didn't she try something like, "I wish that Homura's next attempt would be a complete success" or "I wish that I'd never had a high potential"? Wishing for an undetermined deus ex machina to arise to fix things sounds like something said in desperation because she didn't know enough to form a workable solution on her own.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Because both of those wish examples are fucking terrible and the wish she made was pretty much a perfect Path to Victory wish. She went much higher than "Homura's next attempt at looping" or even just "The Mitakihara situation." She made a wish with possibly as much scope as the Law of Cycles wish, and in a way that would leave Homura satisfied if it comes to pass.

Imagine, if you will. Madoka wants to help Homura. Needs to help her. She has all the information she had before, plus the Potentialbomb. She wants to fix this whole stupid system, save everyone she knows, and give Homura success.

The last one is a stickler. If she contracts, Homura automatically fails and has to try again. But maybe she accounts for that. Maybe she specifically wanted to have her cake and eat it too, planning for things to be fixed next time without her direct involvement.

But she doesn't really have THAT much time to Rules-Lawyer things out, and honestly, she doesn't need to. Wording doesn't matter.

Only intent.

And there's really only one way to get everything she wants in a single statement.

She wants everything to be fixed. The method doesn't matter; if the end result isn't what she likes, the process wouldn't produce it. She wished for a specific end state and bound all of causality, everywhere, to bend towards realizing it.

Her wish, like the one in canon, was perfect. And the fact that it's a wish designed to keep her from being contracted implies she knows what contracting does to Homura, because it's part of the effect and thus part of her intent.

Hell, with that reasoning, she almost HAD to be Potentialbombed. It's the most logical explanation.
 
...You guys need to- well, okay, maybe you don't, realistically speaking only maybe one in ten thousand people needs to take a Real Math Class at some point, but seriously people you're trying to do basic epistemology starting from philosophy? Not going to work. Here, let me assist.
There, the axioms that define Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory, which is sufficiently complete that you can build all of modern mathematics and from there basic probability, bayes' law, information theory, and then you can get started on things like figuring out what you're looking at.

And I'm not going to subject you guys to an argument over the Axiom of Choice, so I'm just going to leave it off and if you want you can add it in yourself.

(hopefully these render on everyone else's computers...)
 
AuraTwilight said:
A) Homura wasn't letting him talk to her through use of Desert Eagle and was planning to use Madoka to deliver it
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
As others have pointed out, there's no way to keep Kyubey from talking to someone. He uses telepathy. He could tell her from the other side of a concrete wall, if need be.

AuraTwilight said:
Hell, with that reasoning, she almost HAD to be Potentialbombed. It's the most logical explanation.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's a pretty outrageous assumption. She could just as easily have made the same wish if she knew almost nothing. It's a wish that requires no context to form.
 
AuraTwilight said:
And the fact that it's a wish designed to keep her from being contracted implies she knows what contracting does to Homura, because it's part of the effect and thus part of her intent.

Hell, with that reasoning, she almost HAD to be Potentialbombed. It's the most logical explanation.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Hmm. Wishes run on intent. Madoka's wish would only consider preventing Madoka from contracting to be "fixing" things if she herself considered the state of her having wished itself as being broken. (Otherwise, it would work to fix stuff like the lichbomb and witches existing without dissuading the contract itself.)

But if she considered "the state of having wished" to be "broken", the only reason for her to make that wish is if she was going to retroactively undo it.

And it's a fairly safe assumption that any quest character dumped into PMMM with metaknowledge will try and prevent Madoka from wishing, so if we accept that we are here as a result of Madoka's wish, then it follows that Madoka wished to not have wished, effectively.

Theoretically, she could have decided to do that for unrelated reasons. Practically, it seems to strongly imply she was potentialbombed.

I've said this before, but will repeat it now: I consider last timeline Madoka's wish to be a better wish than her canon one, and believe that having made a better wish implies that this Madoka was more informed than her canon self. (To the point that I considered that she might have been made aware of the events of Rebellion before wishing.)
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top