To make people actually remember, here's it once for posterity: Minako is nonbinary and uses they/them. This message will be pinned so you people stop getting it wrong and pissing me off. If you get it wrong in the future I'm going to be much less nice, considering you have to scroll past it just to read the quest.
As Moid pointed out in the author's note, the SQ1 happy ending was in many senses a personal triumph, one still leaving the system in place. My own suspicion is that if we reach a happy ending in SQ2, it will be by addressing the system, somehow. We can't really aim for that (not in the same way we can continue to GET GUD in order to fight a giant Wally World Night), but I'd eat some form of hat if there's a final boss that's just basically Water Gun Night but BIGGER. So, yeah, as long as we're relying on deeply personal solutions, Kuub will just take as long as it needs to fuck over absolutely everything.
Also as a QM, yes, I don't think the "bad form" comments are particularly accurate to the realities of how (most) Quests function? Including basically all of the most popular ones?
I meant more, okay, the solution to capitalism combined with imperialism and a patriarchal structure that exploits the vulnerable for the gains of the powerful the Incubator's system isn't going to be to win the lottery again defeat an even bigger Witch and obtain a Hyper Grief Seed that can store a million times more grief, or something.
Just because you won the lottery and settled down on some land to raise a family beat the giant Witch and had a kid, doesn't keep capitalist vultures from bribing the mayor into declaring eminent domain over your house in order to make it into a parking lot Kuub from being able to manipulate and scheme to undermine your rejection of the system's ultimate outcome.
Only by overthrowing the system overthrowing the system--oops, these are the same now, aren't they?--can a truly happy ending be achieved, and so it was my suspicion that SQ2, if a happy ending is achieved (and there's every chance it's not going to be, of course), will at least sorta-kinda address that issue.
There's a million different ways to say "I don't appreciate being condescended to in my thread, and your first response probably shouldn't be to double down."
But I guess I just said that.
Keep it up, and I kick you out. Am I abundantly clear?
It wouldn't be that hard to get the thread to vote for a contract, if you do maybe one or two more witch situations like the last one, it'd happen in a heartbeat. This last update seems...hasty? Dogmatic? Authorial intent turned into fiat and now people are reacting negatively.
I can't imagine the Audience voting to contract for a while if they had control of Mina, because we're stubborn. So if moid thinks it's part of their arc to contract it sorta had to be out of our control or pressured.
And if we had control of takane or sayakoko, what would we have done differently? Skipped the call with madoka? Randomly came over to the house after an exhausting and traumatizing witch fight?
If you're saying what I think you mean, then that depends on the execution.
But literally anything where we're making choices is less railroady, even if it's still railroaded. At that point it's a matter of degrees. How railroaded it is, rather than is/is not.
Like, this isn't actually a bad thing from a reader's point of view--something like this was inevitable, because the powers in play engineering it are well practiced at playing on human insecurities and nature.
TBH A Quest is a story that's being told that lets players have input on certain plot beats, and for all this this is a Wish that probably should lead to an instant witchbomb... Well, I don't think Minako was raised to be someone who just immediately cracks and succumbs when the veil's lifted from their eyes.
Presuming the Wish wasn't tampered with (And that would required the Incubator to have abilities and asshole genie shit beyond what they showed in the original material--the Incubator fulfills the spirit of the wish as well--the problem is typically that what you wish for is rarely what you actually need) Then as much as Minako is going to understand the ocean of shit they just stepped into.
Well, they're also going to understand how much love was involved in trying to protect them. That's not a small thing--it's the one thing that tends to beat despair after all.
Yo, as a QM sometimes you have important story beats that you have to hit to make the story make sense. That's not railroading, that's the nature of quests. This isn't a tabletop campaign, it's an interactive story that still has a beginning, middle and end. Railroading (which as a term, I despise in this context) is going to happen, whether it's the characters favorite color or an important character beat that needs to be hit in order for the story to make sense/have its main conflict.
There are plenty of dramatic situations in my own quests where I don't put out a vote because I don't think it serves the story.
Yo, as a QM sometimes you have important story beats that you have to hit to make the story make sense. That's not railroading, that's the nature of quests. This isn't a tabletop campaign, it's an interactive story that still has a beginning, middle and end. Railroading (which as a term, I despise in this context) is going to happen, whether it's the characters favorite color or an important character beat that needs to be hit in order for the story to make sense/have its main conflict.
There are plenty of dramatic situations in my own quests where I don't put out a vote because I don't think it serves the story.
I meant more, okay, the solution to capitalism combined with imperialism and a patriarchal structure that exploits the vulnerable for the gains of the powerful the Incubator's system isn't going to be to win the lottery again defeat an even bigger Witch and obtain a Hyper Grief Seed that can store a million times more grief, or something.
Just because you won the lottery and settled down on some land to raise a family beat the giant Witch and had a kid, doesn't keep capitalist vultures from bribing the mayor into declaring eminent domain over your house in order to make it into a parking lot Kuub from being able to manipulate and scheme to undermine your rejection of the system's ultimate outcome.
Only by overthrowing the system overthrowing the system--oops, these are the same now, aren't they?--can a truly happy ending be achieved, and so it was my suspicion that SQ2, if a happy ending is achieved (and there's every chance it's not going to be, of course), will at least sorta-kinda address that issue.
I'm not sure if such escalation of ending happiness is necessary. Maybe the happy ending will be cementing how Mitakihara's lot in this world is a little better than other cities', as far as meguca are concerned.
Or maybe it's about Minako being a magi child of magi. Perhaps Minako's to show the meguca world that magi can have normal families and their children can be magi and that doesn't mean they're doomed?
I don't know, it might be too early to tell at this point.
Every time we switch to their perspective is technically a perspective interlude. We're not actually entitled to that sort of control over them people are complaining about, and people treating Moid like they're being an objectively bad writer for doing something they don't like is really fucking shitty, and between this, the constant misgendering, and the fucking speckling of racist jokes, y'alls should be motherfucking ashamed of creating this atmosphere in Moid's space. You know who you are.
Somehow, no matter how clear you make it, there's always some stellar intellects who can't tell when a quest has more to it than fulfilling a power fantasy of absolute control. For real, accusations of Railroading always baffle me in the context of a quest, it's like people don't realise that the QM ultimately has control over the narrative anyway. This is fanfiction with extra audience engagement for flavour, not a play by post RP.
And for the record, if this comes off as sudden and ass-pull to you, then it's not the writing that's the problem. You just weren't paying attention.
Kasamino is her kingdom. But she calls it a democracy. She is the queen. But her subjects all gave her the strength. She lords over her people. Because of course she does. She's the only person who knows how to run this godforsaken city, this world of broken girls just across the bay from prosperity.
It's her kingdom, but her kingdom is a pit. Toxic smog spews into the sky from a cage of towers at the edge of town, the streets filled with diesel trains and honking cars and people who either live in Mitakihara or would much rather be there. Below there are neon signs and glimmering green lights and smears of purple and blue. Even through her glass window, this high above the streets of Kasamino, she can still hear honking and shouting.
Just outside, there are people still working in brutalist skyscrapers, desperately trying to close deals and meet impossible deadlines. A few are like Lady Rin, with a cup of tea in hand, just watching the people below scurry like ants in the dead of night. Perhaps she should feel guilt for looking down on the others below, but she has embraced her old role. She knows what she was.
Further below, and there are ramshackle, garbage apartments, each with their own lights on. Conspicuously, some have smoke wafting out of their windows.
With all this chaos and grunge, who wouldn't want to move?
She muses on this, then she chuckles to herself. She already knows why they won't move.
Her people need her.
She rests in her bedroom at the high end of an expensive penthouse. Her room features an ornate Victorian desk, surrounded by stuffed animals and lace. She's dressed in expensive, pricey silk, sitting upon the bottom half of a bunk bed. Just above her, her sister sleeps. She raises her head to her twin's bunk.
She presses her fingers to her lips and gives her a light shush. "Sleep tight, sweet." She slides her hands across the underside of the bunk, towards the window. She presses her fingers against the glass, taps a holographic button, presses a code and a timer.
The window will close in fifteen seconds. It will reopen in two hours.
That's all she needs.
An opening large enough for her to walk through slides open from her place on the floor. In front of her, on a chariot of smoke and dust, is her right-hand woman. She curtsies. "Hana?"
"They're ready for your speech, ma'am." Her rider stretches her hand. "Are you coming, Lady Rin?"
"Of course I am." She takes a step onto the smokey path. The moonlight passes from the shadow of the skyscraper onto her pale skin. She takes one step, then two. A brilliant white dress shimmers into existence, arm-length opera gloves of pure, gorgeous lace emerging unto her skin.
Her lipstick glimmers. Half of her hair glows, while the dark streak turns pitch-black, dark enough to put a hole in reality. She slides her hand across an invisible rail before she enters the moonlight.
And then she transforms. Six massive wings unfurl from her back, each lined with black eyes with white irises. Her dress explodes across her legs, her shirt turned into a short cloak with two billowing sigils. Her hair begins to float as though it were submerged in water. And finally she leaves the window, her feet gliding through the air as she simply floats ahead towards the rider.
"Are the others there?" she asks.
"Of course, ma'am." The Rider slides into her seat. "Now, what of the Congregation?"
Rin taps her chin. "A bit of a shame that we had to lose an enforcer. A great shame, that one. There was also the matter of one girl who managed to witch at the edge of town. She will be greatly missed as well."
"Ah, she learned about witches?"
"That tends to be how these things work. The realization that not only was her wish ill-considered, but she had damned herself to oblivion."
She slides into the open chariot before the entire thing rolls forwards through the skies.
"There is a reason Incubator prefers to hide that particular truth." She turns to her co-rider. "Isn't that right?"
'Of course.' The plush toy besides her rubs his face, licks his paws, and wriggles in his seat. 'The cycle of Magi to Witch is crucial for a healthy ecosystem. And that transition must be allowed to repeat. If a magi is left alive for too long, it leads to stagnation.'
"And that stagnation is incredibly unhealthy to your end goal, is it not?"
'Correct.' The creature smiles. 'And speaking of end goals, I have recently contracted the Miki child. Their wish is successfully fulfilled.'
"They?" The girl pushes her hand into her chest. "Oh, bless her heart. She doesn't know her destiny."
Incubator simply stares. 'The important part is that their wish is a stepping stone. It's a very, very important first step, possibly the most difficult of them.'
"Right, right." Rin rolls her feet. "So, what of my Congregation?"
'Left alone. Their grief levels are stable, and will increase as normal when they leave your influence.'
"Excellent." The girl steps from her chariot as it stops at the radio tower, at the very tip top of the structure. "We will launch an opening salvo soon." She raises her hands. "The Mitakihara Magi will probably expect a war at some point. Things still need to be organized, attacks planned if we so need to.
"Do you perhaps believe that Sayaka can be convinced of our cause?"
'I believe that is impossible.'
"Ah..." Rin sighs. "A shame. I did not want to shatter that family further. But sometimes, you have to break a few eggs."
Getting a bit of a Biblical angel vibe from Rin's costume there. (The kind that introduce themselves with "FEAR NOT" and have too many eyes, not the toned-down versions from European art.)
Getting a bit of a Biblical angel vibe from Rin's costume there. (The kind that introduce themselves with "FEAR NOT" and have too many eyes, not the toned-down versions from European art.)
This looks like the situation where having a time-stopping Magi with a lot of guns and explosives might come in handy. It wouldn't be quite SQ without Homura and ridiculous fire support, after all~
Hunh, It's a bit off the wall, but I have to wonder: Given the imagery in the transformation here (A Seraphim-esque witch doesn't sound too out of place for what we see of Rin,) the talk of stagnation and how it ties into the witchbomb, and everything around that...
Are Rin and the Glow trying to become something between a magical girl and a witch?
