Did Sayaka realize something, or am I missing something obvious here?
Puella Magi Adfligo Systema
- Thread starter Firnagzen
- Start date
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She realized that Hijiri really is as much of an idiot as our stories about her made her seem. Why the fuck do you trust someone as shady as Yuuri. Not to mention attack the very people that you want to run away from with absolutely no goal in mind.
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- Location
- Your Native Universe
That counts under information of the girl's abilities, but not her exact wish. They're closely linked, but the difference is distinct.
- Location
- Illinois
Okay. First off, please remember that evading questions is bad.
That was the last line of the update. The current leading vote ignores it. Not okay.
I would like to get Oriko over here to talk to Hijiri. Frankly, Hijiri is terrified of us right now. Oriko will be able to act as a counterweight to us by way of being someone who was on the other end of us at one point but has since seen quite thoroughly what we do with people we can't just allow to leave immediately.
What I WANT to do on re-reading this.
[] She is not free to leave at this time. However, that is not a permanent state of affairs and we will guarantee her safety as long as she doesn't actively work against us. We are here because the Pleiades Saints were woken up in the middle of the night to learn that their home had been invaded. We are not here to inflict lasting harm on anyone unless we are absolutely forced to do so.
[] Telepathy group. Yuuri is apparently involved and at large. Hijiri sounds a good bit more scared than malicious. If somebody can get Oriko over here, you think that would be helpful.
[] Consult Saki and any other present Pleiades about what would make them comfortable with Hijiri being bound up; get Hijiri out of the bindings.
[] There is a large range of questions you would like to ask her, including why she is scared of Niko Kanna, but any information on Yuuri takes precedence as a matter of safety, if she is willing to provide it.
It is however a little... brusque.
Subrosian_Smithy
endless
- Location
- Washington
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
Who gives a shit if it's legal? We're magical girls, our very existence is an outside context problem for the law, and we're no-where near ready to break the masquerade and re-integrate meguca into wider society.
Karnewarrior
Leastmost of the Hanged Man Arcana
It's illegal for a reason. It's destablizing and sends the wrong message. Social Mores must have a mechanism to enforce them as much as they need a mechanism to change them if they become burdensome - otherwise, the entire culture spins out of whack and is consumed by other cultures.
I was making a point anyway. She still did something wrong and of her own volition - these need to be nipped in the bud somehow, or else everyone will think it's just dandy to start stealing Seeds. Remember the plan about 1 week ago before we knew it was Hijiri? It was basically a magical curbstomp and a giant firey NO.
There's still a good chance Hijiri is lying, and I don't trust her.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
As far as Hijiri is concerned, we've delivered our giant flaming NO. Time to move to step two, which is figuring out why and addressing the underlying problem.
Leaving Hijiri with O&K plus a Pleiades (Niko?) while we go after Yuuri sounds very reasonable to me.
We should to tell Hijiri to ask Niko about her Wish.
We need to figure out what Hijiri wished for. She came up with the same power, so it should be something at least vaguely similar. If she'd wished to be left alone I'd expect, first, stealth powers, and second, that her wish would've prevented Sabrina from causing too many problems for her.
Leaving Hijiri with O&K plus a Pleiades (Niko?) while we go after Yuuri sounds very reasonable to me.
We should to tell Hijiri to ask Niko about her Wish.
We need to figure out what Hijiri wished for. She came up with the same power, so it should be something at least vaguely similar. If she'd wished to be left alone I'd expect, first, stealth powers, and second, that her wish would've prevented Sabrina from causing too many problems for her.
Subrosian_Smithy
endless
- Location
- Washington
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
Hah! I was dreading a response about culture war nonsense, but somehow I find myself surprised anyways.
There is no established meguca culture, and there is no established monopoly on force and decision-making for meguca. As far as sending the wrong messages, we're a post-scarcity economy in the making, and the only cost of replacing a clear seed is a comparatively minuscule amount of time; and as far as I can tell, there's a much higher ceiling for optimization on clear seed production than cranking them out one seed at a time. We could be clearing multiple seeds at once and setting up a wider industry around us, inviting people to bring their seeds into our control radius, and I expect that will be the norm if this quest goes on for long enough without us finding an alternative to clear seeds.
Worrying about people stealing clear seeds out of desperation for sustenance is like worrying that someone stole a loaf of bread, when we already want everyone to be able to eat, and there's untold thousands or millions of pounds of raw dough left uncooked, and we can bake bread like an industrial factory.
Worrying about people stealing clear seeds for using magic in a destructive fashion is a logical concern, but that has nothing to do with the fear and desperation motives that we're talking about.
I can easily tell you think her actions were morally wrong; I just have no idea how you can begin to evaluate that when we don't know if she's telling the truth or not, and when we don't know what she knows.
Hijiri's desperation, if she's telling the truth, absolutely makes her morally in the clear (or at least not in the wrong, per se). If she believed that she needed the memory field in order to survive a violent assault by someone hunting her down, that takes equal or greater precedence over the needs (of the others) to use the memory field for hiding inanimate objects.
Yuuri's theft of the clear seed may be more morally objectionable, but we don't know her motives with any strong level of confidence and can't evaluate.
- Location
- Auf dem Tisch
Well. Shit. I mean, I'm not gonna lie, my first impulse here was
[x] Hug meguca
-[x] HUG MEGUCA
-[x] Group hug meguca
-[x] Make Niko hug meguca
But damn, y'all are right that something reeks about all of this. Compassionate caution is unfortunately necessary.
Possibly more alarming, though, is oh fuck, Yuuri has a Clear Seed. Remember, she made the Evil Nuts. (Also has an annoying grab bag of other abilities. Good dammit, Asunaro, we could be hugging Mami right now!)
So anyway, we need to continue to deescalate; I don't think Firn would have explained the Saints will be agitated as an idle threat, so this applies to both sides.
Everyone, if you failed to earlier, read the article Veb linked about interrogation; we cannot let this turn into an episode of American TV.
Conversely, on a reread, I'm not feeling entirely confident about Hijiri's truthfulness.
She didn't supply the name herself. She reacted to it, but... maybe I'm just paranoid, but Asunaro. Or this bit:
Protecting her from what?
And this is just weird:
EDIT: Hang on...
[x] Hug meguca
-[x] HUG MEGUCA
-[x] Group hug meguca
-[x] Make Niko hug meguca
But damn, y'all are right that something reeks about all of this. Compassionate caution is unfortunately necessary.
Possibly more alarming, though, is oh fuck, Yuuri has a Clear Seed. Remember, she made the Evil Nuts. (Also has an annoying grab bag of other abilities. Good dammit, Asunaro, we could be hugging Mami right now!)
So anyway, we need to continue to deescalate; I don't think Firn would have explained the Saints will be agitated as an idle threat, so this applies to both sides.
Everyone, if you failed to earlier, read the article Veb linked about interrogation; we cannot let this turn into an episode of American TV.
Conversely, on a reread, I'm not feeling entirely confident about Hijiri's truthfulness.
She didn't supply the name herself. She reacted to it, but... maybe I'm just paranoid, but Asunaro. Or this bit:
Protecting her from what?
And this is just weird:
Was there a typo here or did Saki really not understand it was Yuuri until she said it herself?
EDIT: Hang on...
Are you...?
Oh my god, you are. You are seriously making this argument. XD
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Onmur
Archangel of Nutella.
Getting Oriko over would take a while... and there's still a hunt going on.
[X] Group telepathy: Yuuri might be behind this. Search must go on.
[X] Be empathetic Sabrina.
[X] We can't let her go until this is solved.
-[X] Apologize for that, and for scaring her. We're not after her, but after whomever attacked our friends. If she's saying the truth, that somebody is Yuuri.
-[X] And well, she did shoot at us. No hard feelings?
[X] Explain Niko's one Wish was for Hijiri to have the peaceful life Niko felt she herself couldn't.
-[X] Hijiri is not an experiment. We can promise that, because we know Niko is conflicted right now, hurt, because she cares about Hijiri in her own way.
-[X] Ask Hijiri to talk with Niko; offer your support.
[X] After this is over, we'd love to help her achieve that 'peaceful life'. It's why we made our Wish.
[X] Once the Pleiades arrive, be ready to step in if necessary. Keep things calm.
Subrosian_Smithy
endless
- Location
- Washington
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
Yes, I am.
AuraTwilight
The Sorcerer of Smiles
- Location
- The Silver City
Nitpick, Hijiri made the Evil Nuts, and also they're called Asunaro Almonds thank you very much.
Karnewarrior
Leastmost of the Hanged Man Arcana
Captain Memetics here, to save the day! Ba dada da!
Kind of like how all life has genetic information storage. Kinda hard to live if you don't have DNA/RNA/some weird way of storing information.
So, as far as one goes, you're totally right. Saying Meguca Culture is like saying "Human Culture", except even sillier because Meguca Culture is currently in a weird skewed state with modern moral rationalism on one side and the tribal-like, hunter-gatherer mindset driven by witch hunting. There's thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Meguca Sub-culture Culture Groups alone. Girls in Wichita are exposed to an entirely different sub-culture of American than girls in New York, compounding on the cultures of the Humans in the region and the sub-culture or sub-cultures they originally belonged to. So already you're in a complex situation where Claire is an American, a Southerner, a Goth, and a Magical Girl, all of which have conflicting and competing impetuses and are likely on a rotation through her conception of her Master Status. She's going to have a completely different experience than a girl in Tokyo who's Japanese, a Gyaru, and lives in Osaka.
But that's the problem - these girls have no unifying culture. Nothing to rally to. It's incredibly difficult, and likely actively discouraged by Coobie, to start to form any sort of uniquely Meguca culture, since they're forced to live in secret, often alone, and when they do group up it's rarely more than four or five girls. Not to mention they're constantly bombarded by outside memes from the culture they were raised in, which probably makes them not even aware of the fact that being Meguca forces a culture-change: especially if Coobs needs a witch now and decides to tactfully omit that they need to hunt to survive, the major wedge driven between Humans and Meguca.
This feeds into number two: We are a (mostly, there are some limits that will have to be adressed, but only many many years from now) Post-Scarcity Event. Which removes all the normal issues that drive Meguca and Humans as well as Meguca and Meguca apart - simply providing the Clear Seeds will almost certainly provide impetus for Meguca nations to begin formation, in much the same way agriculture allowed civilizations to flourish where it was taken up (and after good crops were found in the area, natch). If we don't think about the culture we're forming, we're going to be under the influence of the effectively random interactions between the local groups of Meguca now freed to look elsewhere and towards bigger and more esoteric things. This means we're going to experience something similar to Africa under colonization, except without the Europeans being knowingly involved.
The thing is, some groups will be more violent than others. And barring us establishing a government to control and distribute Seeds - or, as you suggest, allowing the rogue groups to simply rob the comfier groups - these groups will attempt to leverage their new powers to gain power over other groups. This doesn't need to be for Seeds specifically; perhaps the groups had a long-time grudge, or perhaps Leader A pissed Leader B off during a meeting, or perhaps they're just led by Sasa and are angry little shits. Whatever the reason, if this happens enough times, the more aggressive group will win. Especially if we permit theft, since most girls, regardless of the post-scarcity nature of the object, will object to having their things stolen. It's a natural reaction.
So this leads to more tension. The Agressive groups are expanding, slowly consuming the less aggressive groups that they can, either for kicks, for honor, or for more manpower to defeat a larger group that fills one of the above two. Assuming we're part of a society ourself, this makes problems for us, because it radicalizes the population into a more pacifist camp and a more xenophobic camp - "We have to build a wall, or else the London Group will invade us!" "The London Group had legitimate grievances! They aren't to blame here!"
Now we can play peacekeeper, but even assuming the hostile group doesn't bother us specifically, the radicalization will continue so long as the hostile group continues to expand. This happens regardless of the scarcity of the "food" resource - Clear Seeds - because it's independent of it. The hostile group is expanding for other reasons, and the pacifists are slowly absorbed politically which almost inevitably results in a consumption one way or the other - either the hostile group crushes the pacifist culture into the dirt, or the pacifists consume the hostile culture mores to some extent and strike back, possibly achieving independence.
Now no political entity lasts forever except for Queen Elizabeth II, but remember this is happening everywhere and every time the Clear Seed supply expands into an area. It's simply the result of human behavior once the basic needs are taken care of. And there's no telling what the cultural conflicts above would imply for the system we saw in history; if the Humans find out about Meguca nations rising and falling, they may fear for their own sovereignty and begin conflicting with Meguca governments on their own. Or, and this is likely the less common but more successful scenario, the Meguca get folded into the Human government and returns to being a subculture of the larger political entity.
It's a natural cycle and a result of us putting out Clear Seeds, so we should accept that it will happen. However, we should prepare to minimize the negative effects as far as we can, because that's what heroes do. Also because this cycle happens over hundreds of years and Firn isn't going to live to see the end of his story if that's the end of it.
Because if you give people an inch, they have a tendency to take a mile. Or in this case, an entire stores worth of bread, because that FUCKING FRED also shops at this deli and he's an ASSHOLE who doesn't DESERVE BREAD.
It's also worth noting that in this case, she actually would have stolen an entire stores worth of bread. We may be a bread factory, but we don't actuallly have access to that much dough. Unless you think Homura's been hiding 30+ Seeds in her shield and hasn't had us Clear them yet because... why?
Desperation also doesn't make it morally acceptable because Social Mores, and more pointedly law, is such a blunt instrument that it would make SV look like a collaborative effort to envision the perfect system of friend-making people by Mr. Rodgers and a team of crack sociologists. You teach Social Mores, and in extension law (since Mores are often made into laws), to 2 year olds, so it's incredibly difficult to teach them anything more complicated than "Stealing is bad! Sharing is good! Punching Mommy in the face is bad!". You certainly can't start adding in "except for:" clauses until the kids old enough that they've already absorbed the moral system in place. Then those exceptions seem cool and awesome and new, because everyone knows that stealing is bad, but if you steal from the rich and give to the poor, you can still be a good guy. And that's weird and fascinating and new.
So we need to establish Mores and we need to start now, since we've recently reached a critical mass and a proper subculture is going to begin developing fast. If we're going to have anything resembling a fair system of distribution, we need a fair government. For that we need fair laws. For that, we need to make sure everyone knows what Mores are in place - probably, the traditional Japanese Social Mores.
She obviously wasn't desperate for grief seeds when she robbed Niko, or else she wouldn't have let Yuuri take it... So she either did it out of maliciousness, which I'd love to see you argue in favor of that being acceptable, or she did it because she was manipulated, in which case she still can't be trusted because she could still be being manipulated, and makes her a dumbass. A dangerous dumbass.
Personally I think she's lying. If she wanted a peaceful life, becoming Meguca was definitely a step in the wrong direction. Picking a fight with the Pleiades is a step in the wrong direction. Every one of her actions thus far points to her being a malicious actor who didn't expect to have Guca Team Six drop on top of her like ODST, and now she's either lying through her teeth or ratting on the whole group in favor of mercy.
Motive is important, but it takes backseat to action. If your motives are pure but you keep committing villainous acts, you're going to, and ought to, get socked in the face either proverbially or literally.
Believe me, I would be the first one to forgive Meguca Hitler for everything she'd done, but first they have to show honest remorse. Until then, they're still considered a threat, and will be treated as such.
TL;DR because this post is bigger than Trump's Wall:
Meguca have a culture. (Seriously, WTF, they obviously do, half the game's been destroying the thing)
Meguca are humans and humans have a tendency to take more than they need.
We're not truly post-scarcity yet, we can't afford to let them take what they want, only what they need.
Bad shit happens if you let any channel be an acceptable channel to a valuable resource.
Being desperate doesn't make violating Social Mores not do bad shit.
Hijiri probably wasn't desperate when she committed the crime.
I'm willing to forgive her but I need to know she's said sorry and means it first.
Probably because this isn't really about culture wars - I was merely pointing to the fact that we don't live in a cultural vaccuum, and that having social mores is a good thing. That's why all cultures have them.
Kind of like how all life has genetic information storage. Kinda hard to live if you don't have DNA/RNA/some weird way of storing information.
Bold is mine.
So, as far as one goes, you're totally right. Saying Meguca Culture is like saying "Human Culture", except even sillier because Meguca Culture is currently in a weird skewed state with modern moral rationalism on one side and the tribal-like, hunter-gatherer mindset driven by witch hunting. There's thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of Meguca Sub-culture Culture Groups alone. Girls in Wichita are exposed to an entirely different sub-culture of American than girls in New York, compounding on the cultures of the Humans in the region and the sub-culture or sub-cultures they originally belonged to. So already you're in a complex situation where Claire is an American, a Southerner, a Goth, and a Magical Girl, all of which have conflicting and competing impetuses and are likely on a rotation through her conception of her Master Status. She's going to have a completely different experience than a girl in Tokyo who's Japanese, a Gyaru, and lives in Osaka.
But that's the problem - these girls have no unifying culture. Nothing to rally to. It's incredibly difficult, and likely actively discouraged by Coobie, to start to form any sort of uniquely Meguca culture, since they're forced to live in secret, often alone, and when they do group up it's rarely more than four or five girls. Not to mention they're constantly bombarded by outside memes from the culture they were raised in, which probably makes them not even aware of the fact that being Meguca forces a culture-change: especially if Coobs needs a witch now and decides to tactfully omit that they need to hunt to survive, the major wedge driven between Humans and Meguca.
This feeds into number two: We are a (mostly, there are some limits that will have to be adressed, but only many many years from now) Post-Scarcity Event. Which removes all the normal issues that drive Meguca and Humans as well as Meguca and Meguca apart - simply providing the Clear Seeds will almost certainly provide impetus for Meguca nations to begin formation, in much the same way agriculture allowed civilizations to flourish where it was taken up (and after good crops were found in the area, natch). If we don't think about the culture we're forming, we're going to be under the influence of the effectively random interactions between the local groups of Meguca now freed to look elsewhere and towards bigger and more esoteric things. This means we're going to experience something similar to Africa under colonization, except without the Europeans being knowingly involved.
The thing is, some groups will be more violent than others. And barring us establishing a government to control and distribute Seeds - or, as you suggest, allowing the rogue groups to simply rob the comfier groups - these groups will attempt to leverage their new powers to gain power over other groups. This doesn't need to be for Seeds specifically; perhaps the groups had a long-time grudge, or perhaps Leader A pissed Leader B off during a meeting, or perhaps they're just led by Sasa and are angry little shits. Whatever the reason, if this happens enough times, the more aggressive group will win. Especially if we permit theft, since most girls, regardless of the post-scarcity nature of the object, will object to having their things stolen. It's a natural reaction.
So this leads to more tension. The Agressive groups are expanding, slowly consuming the less aggressive groups that they can, either for kicks, for honor, or for more manpower to defeat a larger group that fills one of the above two. Assuming we're part of a society ourself, this makes problems for us, because it radicalizes the population into a more pacifist camp and a more xenophobic camp - "We have to build a wall, or else the London Group will invade us!" "The London Group had legitimate grievances! They aren't to blame here!"
Now we can play peacekeeper, but even assuming the hostile group doesn't bother us specifically, the radicalization will continue so long as the hostile group continues to expand. This happens regardless of the scarcity of the "food" resource - Clear Seeds - because it's independent of it. The hostile group is expanding for other reasons, and the pacifists are slowly absorbed politically which almost inevitably results in a consumption one way or the other - either the hostile group crushes the pacifist culture into the dirt, or the pacifists consume the hostile culture mores to some extent and strike back, possibly achieving independence.
Now no political entity lasts forever except for Queen Elizabeth II, but remember this is happening everywhere and every time the Clear Seed supply expands into an area. It's simply the result of human behavior once the basic needs are taken care of. And there's no telling what the cultural conflicts above would imply for the system we saw in history; if the Humans find out about Meguca nations rising and falling, they may fear for their own sovereignty and begin conflicting with Meguca governments on their own. Or, and this is likely the less common but more successful scenario, the Meguca get folded into the Human government and returns to being a subculture of the larger political entity.
It's a natural cycle and a result of us putting out Clear Seeds, so we should accept that it will happen. However, we should prepare to minimize the negative effects as far as we can, because that's what heroes do. Also because this cycle happens over hundreds of years and Firn isn't going to live to see the end of his story if that's the end of it.
This is literally what normal human society does. If I steal a loaf of bread, I get arrested, even though there's tons of dough made in factories every day and I'm quite sure that most people in America would agree that everyone should be able to eat.
Because if you give people an inch, they have a tendency to take a mile. Or in this case, an entire stores worth of bread, because that FUCKING FRED also shops at this deli and he's an ASSHOLE who doesn't DESERVE BREAD.
It's also worth noting that in this case, she actually would have stolen an entire stores worth of bread. We may be a bread factory, but we don't actuallly have access to that much dough. Unless you think Homura's been hiding 30+ Seeds in her shield and hasn't had us Clear them yet because... why?
You'd be suprised, for one. People can move pretty fast from "I'm only stealing because I need it" to "I'm only stealing because if I do I can gorge myself and be fat! Hahahhaa!"
Desperation also doesn't make it morally acceptable because Social Mores, and more pointedly law, is such a blunt instrument that it would make SV look like a collaborative effort to envision the perfect system of friend-making people by Mr. Rodgers and a team of crack sociologists. You teach Social Mores, and in extension law (since Mores are often made into laws), to 2 year olds, so it's incredibly difficult to teach them anything more complicated than "Stealing is bad! Sharing is good! Punching Mommy in the face is bad!". You certainly can't start adding in "except for:" clauses until the kids old enough that they've already absorbed the moral system in place. Then those exceptions seem cool and awesome and new, because everyone knows that stealing is bad, but if you steal from the rich and give to the poor, you can still be a good guy. And that's weird and fascinating and new.
So we need to establish Mores and we need to start now, since we've recently reached a critical mass and a proper subculture is going to begin developing fast. If we're going to have anything resembling a fair system of distribution, we need a fair government. For that we need fair laws. For that, we need to make sure everyone knows what Mores are in place - probably, the traditional Japanese Social Mores.
Because we watched her commit a hostile act against one of our friends, and know she participated in a robbery of another of our friends, as well as another (non-lethal) assault. If you believe her, that's what she's saying. If you don't believe her, then she's committed Perjury in addition to the assault with a lethal magic.
She obviously wasn't desperate for grief seeds when she robbed Niko, or else she wouldn't have let Yuuri take it... So she either did it out of maliciousness, which I'd love to see you argue in favor of that being acceptable, or she did it because she was manipulated, in which case she still can't be trusted because she could still be being manipulated, and makes her a dumbass. A dangerous dumbass.
Personally I think she's lying. If she wanted a peaceful life, becoming Meguca was definitely a step in the wrong direction. Picking a fight with the Pleiades is a step in the wrong direction. Every one of her actions thus far points to her being a malicious actor who didn't expect to have Guca Team Six drop on top of her like ODST, and now she's either lying through her teeth or ratting on the whole group in favor of mercy.
It takes precendece for her as an individual maybe. But as a different Meguca? We can't let this pass. As a group of Meguca aiming to become a more solid political entity? We sure as hell can't let this pass.
Motive is important, but it takes backseat to action. If your motives are pure but you keep committing villainous acts, you're going to, and ought to, get socked in the face either proverbially or literally.
Believe me, I would be the first one to forgive Meguca Hitler for everything she'd done, but first they have to show honest remorse. Until then, they're still considered a threat, and will be treated as such.
TL;DR because this post is bigger than Trump's Wall:
Meguca have a culture. (Seriously, WTF, they obviously do, half the game's been destroying the thing)
Meguca are humans and humans have a tendency to take more than they need.
We're not truly post-scarcity yet, we can't afford to let them take what they want, only what they need.
Bad shit happens if you let any channel be an acceptable channel to a valuable resource.
Being desperate doesn't make violating Social Mores not do bad shit.
Hijiri probably wasn't desperate when she committed the crime.
I'm willing to forgive her but I need to know she's said sorry and means it first.
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Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
[X] Group telepathy: Yuuri might be behind this. Niko and Kazumi should be here, but everyone else keep looking.
[X] Be empathetic Sabrina.
[x] Information for Hijiri, empathybrina style:
-[x] You Wished for powers that would help all magical girls live peaceful lives.
-[x] You're not after her. You don't experiment on people. That's on the "don't make me come over there" list.
-[x] Reassure her about Niko's intentions; they really need to talk. Hijiri becoming meguca hurt Niko badly.
[x] When Niko and Kazumi get here:
-[x] Keep Kazumi from killing Hijiri.
-[x] Recap.
--[x] Privately express small doubts about truthfulness.
-[x] Suggest:
--[x] Short term: Guard, talk, subtly gather more information. Niko needs to be involved. Oriko, Kirika, Niko + 1 other Pleiades?
--[x] Long term: House arrest, video games, therapy, and a strict no-drama policy. Proven strategy.
-[x] Argue against: Retribution.
[x] Standing votes:
-[x] At first opportunity: Check Hijiri's witch name.
Does Hijiri have Niko's personality, or did the split mess with her memory and cognition enough that we can't draw conclusions? I'm wondering if the "she's going to experiment on me!" thing is typical-mind fallacy, but I don't think I have enough information about what Hijiri's personality should be like to make any guesses.
What do we think are the chances that Hijiri is trying a memory gambit?
[X] Be empathetic Sabrina.
[x] Information for Hijiri, empathybrina style:
-[x] You Wished for powers that would help all magical girls live peaceful lives.
-[x] You're not after her. You don't experiment on people. That's on the "don't make me come over there" list.
-[x] Reassure her about Niko's intentions; they really need to talk. Hijiri becoming meguca hurt Niko badly.
[x] When Niko and Kazumi get here:
-[x] Keep Kazumi from killing Hijiri.
-[x] Recap.
--[x] Privately express small doubts about truthfulness.
-[x] Suggest:
--[x] Short term: Guard, talk, subtly gather more information. Niko needs to be involved. Oriko, Kirika, Niko + 1 other Pleiades?
--[x] Long term: House arrest, video games, therapy, and a strict no-drama policy. Proven strategy.
-[x] Argue against: Retribution.
[x] Standing votes:
-[x] At first opportunity: Check Hijiri's witch name.
Does Hijiri have Niko's personality, or did the split mess with her memory and cognition enough that we can't draw conclusions? I'm wondering if the "she's going to experiment on me!" thing is typical-mind fallacy, but I don't think I have enough information about what Hijiri's personality should be like to make any guesses.
What do we think are the chances that Hijiri is trying a memory gambit?
Explain.
Disagree - If what she's saying is true, she thought that her progenitor had enlisted a Super-Meguca to hunt her down and vivisect her. Note how she valued the memory device over the clear seed.
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Karnewarrior
Leastmost of the Hanged Man Arcana
[X] Group telepathy: Yuuri might be behind this. Niko and Kazumi should be here, but everyone else keep looking.
[X] Be empathetic Sabrina.
[x] Information for Hijiri, empathybrina style:
-[x] You Wished for powers that would help all magical girls live peaceful lives.
-[x] You're not after her. You don't experiment on people. That's on the "don't make me come over there" list.
-[x] Reassure her about Niko's intentions; they really need to talk. Hijiri becoming meguca hurt Niko badly.
[x] When Niko and Kazumi get here:
-[x] Recap.
--[x] Privately express small doubts about truthfulness to Kazumi and Niko.
-[x] Suggest:
--[x] Short term: Guard, talk, subtly gather more information. Niko needs to be involved. Oriko, Kirika, Niko + 1 other Pleiades?
--[x] Long term: House arrest, video games, therapy, and a strict no-drama policy. Proven strategy.
-[x] Argue against: Retribution. Revenge.
--[Q] And dissection. Definitely none of that until Thursday!
[x] Standing votes:
-[x] At first opportunity: Check Hijiri's witch name.
-[x] Keep Kazumi from killing or harming Hijiri.
-[x] Kazumi's in charge, but we've dealt with a similar situation before. Leverage our expertise and guide her without stepping on her authority.
Moved keeping Kazumi from hurting Hijiri to the standing votes list. Clarified the doubts vote because when I first read it I read it as expressing doubt to Hijiri, which we may not want to do. Added a line to make sure we have a standing vote not to step on Kazumi's authority if we can avoid it. Broke the 150 word limit and got threadbanned.
Empathybrina is fine, let's just try to avoid being pushoverbrina.
[X] Be empathetic Sabrina.
[x] Information for Hijiri, empathybrina style:
-[x] You Wished for powers that would help all magical girls live peaceful lives.
-[x] You're not after her. You don't experiment on people. That's on the "don't make me come over there" list.
-[x] Reassure her about Niko's intentions; they really need to talk. Hijiri becoming meguca hurt Niko badly.
[x] When Niko and Kazumi get here:
-[x] Recap.
--[x] Privately express small doubts about truthfulness to Kazumi and Niko.
-[x] Suggest:
--[x] Short term: Guard, talk, subtly gather more information. Niko needs to be involved. Oriko, Kirika, Niko + 1 other Pleiades?
--[x] Long term: House arrest, video games, therapy, and a strict no-drama policy. Proven strategy.
-[x] Argue against: Retribution. Revenge.
--[Q] And dissection. Definitely none of that until Thursday!
[x] Standing votes:
-[x] At first opportunity: Check Hijiri's witch name.
-[x] Keep Kazumi from killing or harming Hijiri.
-[x] Kazumi's in charge, but we've dealt with a similar situation before. Leverage our expertise and guide her without stepping on her authority.
Moved keeping Kazumi from hurting Hijiri to the standing votes list. Clarified the doubts vote because when I first read it I read it as expressing doubt to Hijiri, which we may not want to do. Added a line to make sure we have a standing vote not to step on Kazumi's authority if we can avoid it. Broke the 150 word limit and got threadbanned.
Empathybrina is fine, let's just try to avoid being pushoverbrina.
Subrosian_Smithy
endless
- Location
- Washington
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
You are reading a fucking shit-ton into my words, my dude.
I wasn't advocating for a policy of allowing theft, I was trying to argue against your stance that "fear and desperation doesn't make theft legal or right". If we need to prohibit theft in the name of a stable society, then so be it, but that's never anything more than a necessary evil, and -- although I may be reading too much into your words myself -- you're holding that evil up like a totem and a moral good-in-itself.
No matter how many seeds get out, barring a complete black swan event of some kind, we're pretty much always going to be the most powerful meguca on the planet. Individually, and in our group (Sabrina, Mami, Sayaka). The balance is already in our favor, and it always has been -- we can not only completely roll over and annex anyone we want or need to, but we can actually afford to take the high road, far more consistently than anyone else, and the only thing stopping us from acting on a pure case-by-case basis is our limited bandwidth. A more soluble problem than it looks like.
Right, normal human society arrests people for stealing bread because we live in a scarcity economy. Which, you know, you just agreed that we break over our knee. You're trying to use the scarcity economy to set standards, when we can annihilate muggle scarcity with a few weeks or months of co-operation with muggles, Grief-enabled manufacturing, and trips in and out of Earth's gravity well. These modes of production and property are not going to exist in the long run; not even magical scarcity, unless the number of grief seeds extant on Earth is massively (orders of magnitude) lower than the number of magical girls who will need clear seeds, and unless there are no alternatives. The memory field is exactly the kind of thing we can use to hedge Kyubey out and stop new contracts from being formed, and keep the magical girl system in a stable post-scarcity equilibrium.
But maybe it's my fault, and I chose the wrong metaphor. After all, the loaf of bread in question is the sort of bread that doesn't spoil for years, and keeps you fed for years on end, the kind of product which has no easy analogue in our economy or culture.
We cannot yet distinguish between "Hijiri attacked and stole from us unprompted" and "Hijiri attacked and stole from us because she believed it was the only way to protect herself" as explanations. Both of them are plausibly consistent with the evidence.
You're begging the question. I'm not saying that she didn't do those things; I'm saying that there's a plausible world where she did do those things, but it wasn't implicitly immoral.
She took the memory field, which -- by her account -- she thought she needed for her own personal safety. I realize I muddied the issue by bringing up clear seeds, although Yuuri's theft of the seed is tangential to the situation, and the same arguments about desperation still apply across the board.
I never took the position that she was smart or safe. I took the position that legality had no bearing on the situation, or the morality of the situation, and then as a lesser claim, that Hijiri might not have been acting maliciously or immorally.
Obviously.
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- Location
- Auf dem Tisch
I was expressing amusement. Also astonishment.
Oh right, a vote. I think
[x] Vebyast
actually hits close to what I'm thinking, this time.
Subrosian_Smithy
endless
- Location
- Washington
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
[X] Vebyast
Inserted tally
TJSomething
That's... that's impossible!
I'm not really convinced that the logistics of wealth distribution and inertia of the sociopolitical status quo would really allow us to fix global muggle scarcity a less than a few years. Magical post-scarcity is an easier goal that we can probably achieve much sooner, but that requires negotiating governance with hundreds, or possibly thousands, of independent groups. We've got the Internet, so it's not going to take years, but getting such a diverse group to agree on anything is going to take some doing.
Also, presently, grief seeds are a scarce resource. So, presently, I think we should treat them as scarce. To do otherwise would be counting our chickens before they're hatched.
For all we know, they may continue to be a scarce resource. If we stop the formation of witches, there might not be any way to manufacture grief seeds. Kyuubey can remove grief seeds from circulation and create new magical girls, so I would be unsurprised if we were to end up with significantly more magical girls than grief seeds.
[X] Onmur
...which makes it a tie with Vebyast at 5-5.
...which makes it a tie with Vebyast at 5-5.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
A situation that will only worsen if dewitching turns out to be possible, since each success would mean one less Seed and one more girl that needs cleansing.
And even if that were not the case, being post-scarcity doesn't make stealing okay. If anything, it makes it even worse, because they're taking from others by force when they could have just asked for help and would have received it.
