- Location
- Where I need to be
To guess what went wrong in this case; I suspect that Gaia can communicate with Omega, but can't read its thoughts like she can with humanity, and thought she understood it when she didn't.
Which backfired.
Now to give my thoughts on this development:
This developement isn't really surprising.
Whilst some mind stuff was subtle, the moment we joined her being the moment we started calling her mother was not.
Let's not forget Karen's suddenly good cheer in the lunch meeting when Gaia let up on whatever she was doing with her.
When Gaia stops what she was doing Karen says "its been such a long time". after breathing a sigh of relief.
Furthermore Gaia has straight up influenced Karen to start the war, even if it wasn't very hard.
And you know, as much as we can say that it is for humanity's own good, but umm, that is still a war, and if it fully goes into a World War like Gaia wants, her throwing a number like twelve million dead, when she first described it was lowballing it.
Cerys was perfectly fine with that as well, but I digress:
The first time that we choose to save Willow, Gaia tried to do something to else just for Omega to be able to stop it, such as here:
and rather than learn a lesson not to do that type of thing, she insteads decides to convince the thing that stops her from getting what she wants to do it for her.
But well why would she learn not to do so?
Keep in mind Gaia's reasoning when we accepted her deal to save us from Karen?
It is because Cerys is hers.
Because she owns Cerys.
Karen can't have you because you are mine.
By accepting the offer, there was kind of an implicit agreement on that logic.
Why should you be surprised if someone tries to change something they own to suit their needs?
Consider that until now, all magical girls came from Gaia, which probably meant she had more pull on them than she normally does with other humans, and that she probably choose each for a purpose. Molded them to suit her needs, if the need was truly important and it wasn't done on a whim.
They didn't have Omega as a protection, she has thousands of years of subtly nudging humanity in general, and less subtly nudging magical girls as a whole, which generally worked as she has wanted it to.
For the betterment of humanity as a weapon for Gaia, to make humanity stronger, smarter, and more protected than before.
Normally she probably wouldn't have made something that would make a magical girl be able to be more resistant to her ability to influence them, I imagine.
Omega is an exception both because that is a side effect of its true ability, which is on a level she didn't normally give magical girls, but gave Cerys as "leader" of the next gen of Magical girls, and because Cerys somehow accidentally made it sapient and able to use its powers without her permission. Hence even when Cerys is distracted or doesn't have it up, it can still act, and can successfully stop what Gaia's doing even after she started doing it.
On the other side, it can be spoken to by her, and influenced, and furthermore, can talk to it without us knowing despite Omega being part of our power. Otherwise we would have seen the conversation leading up to Omega doing this.
Hence a private conversation to convince it her idea is the right one is on the table. Perhaps several.
And with it, she could keep with her tried and true tactics rather than changing her game. All she has to do is get a single being who is at a very impressionable stage of their existence to listen to her, when she can have a private conversation with it on demand.
It did what Gaia intended, but took it a step too far, then refused to back down.
A horrendous backfire born of an error she doesn't normally have to deal with: not knowing the target of her manipulation more completely than it knows itself.
And to go back to this whole Willow debacle, to provide contrast to my previous post on how Gaia kind of fell for Shiva-Sil's ploy:
We agreed with Gaia to fight instigate, and keep a world war going as long as the barrier was up.
We showed willingness to personally kill thousands, and let a war that would take the lives of millions perpetuate.
What, do you think children would not be involved in that? Cerys probably already killed children with the civilian casualties she cased both in the first arc of the story, and when escaping the Clocktower.
Even ignoring Civilian casualties as accidental (especially the first arc, where we barely had any control over our powers):
Many of the people we killed were fathers and mothers, whose children would lose them forever.
And…
We draw the line, at letting a pawn of one of her mortal enemies die?
The pawn of a being that wants to kill her and has enough power to potentially one day do so?
We allowed ourselves to get close to a person like that.
Expose ourselves to whatever nefarious plot that Shiva Sil cooked up when we are a lynchpin in many of Gaia's plans?
Of course she'd be upset by this.
Of course she'd try to stop this.
It is just that, as I previously said, that type of reaction was probably the reaction Shiva Sil was looking for. Gaia gets paranoid because she expects something to happen, but the paranoia was at the very least, a large part of that their goals.
Destroy her bonds with her champion via the sacrifice of an innocent soul.
And this is actually kind of worrying on many levels, even ignoring that Gaia fell for it.
Because we are a person who caused multiple indiscriminate civilian casualties, and is fine with trying to draw a war into full blown world war territory, yet Shiva Sil picked someone that managed to perfectly get past Cerys defenses and:
While she ends her thoughts with Willow looking nothing like Una, she still compared them in her mind, and got the image of Gaia doing the same thing to Una, as she was going to do to Willow.
Shiva Sil managed to pick a person that would give us the best chances of being able to fight against Gaia's mind control without being a Una look-alike which would make things far to obvious.
That they thought this gambit was viable despite Cerys being a person with, again, indiscriminate civilian casualties on two separate occasions, and being fine with forcing the world into a world war…
That speaks a lot about how much information they managed to gather on Cerys.
I am not saying we were wrong to do so, Willow, at least, is innocent in all of this, but…
This is one hell of an introduction to the Twin Gods of Destruction.
And the threat they pose, outside of pure destructive force.
