- Location
- Europe
This has been the true ship all along! HazouXMari(ko)!
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard open voting
This has been the true ship all along! HazouXMari(ko)!
- Location
- Europe
It's not my fault that Shinji genes are that strong.
- Location
- Europe
PLAYERS: let's hide in the woods and aggressively avoid anything potentially interesting or exciting.
QMs: uuugggh this is so boring, It's draining my will to live.
QMs: *a steady stream of interesting chapters, a ton of new research, ect.*
PLAYERS: alright, let's go to the monster-pool and try to capture some deadly monsters.
QMs: finally, some action!
QMs: *short chapters about anything except the deadly monsters.*
I do not understand how your spoons work, but I hope y'all are doing OK.
QMs: uuugggh this is so boring, It's draining my will to live.
QMs: *a steady stream of interesting chapters, a ton of new research, ect.*
PLAYERS: alright, let's go to the monster-pool and try to capture some deadly monsters.
QMs: finally, some action!
QMs: *short chapters about anything except the deadly monsters.*
I do not understand how your spoons work, but I hope y'all are doing OK.
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Real life interfered, iirc. To my eternal shock, QMs exist even outside the context of the quests they run.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Finger-raised-meme.jpg
- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I hope Mari realizes, intellectually, that when we bring Jiraiya there are two possibilities.
I have excluded possibilities like 'Jiraiya wants to marry Mari but can't because of political realities' because EJ has gone on the record that Jiraiya won't come back brain-damaged and that's the only reason he'd say something stupid like that given that he's otherwise intelligent. The point of having power is that you get to do things with it. If opening a portal to the afterlife and dragging Leaf's most beloved contemporary figure back from the dead does not win us sufficient political power to no longer concern ourselves with petty affairs like marriage alliances, then our next step is to track down Ami. Mari is correct that power in any arena can be exchanged for power in any other arena, just at some potentially-unfavourable ratio, and Ami's superpower is the ability to always, always secure a favourable exchange rate. She will be more than happy to help out.
And if that doesn't work, we go and found our own Hidden Village - actually I think we should found a Obvious, Visible Village to make the point that we are no longer open to the idea of doing things as they've traditionally been done in any capacity - and let everyone know that they can be on the side of death-cheating Scroll-toting Dragon-slaying kind-hearted people who really just want everyone to be free to live a decent life, or they can oppose us and our creativity.
I tried to turn that sentiment into an omake but couldn't quite find the words. I might still at a later date.
- He marries her effectively instantly. This is because he's in love with her, because he promised to do so and one of his biggest regrets is not having married her and he is certainly not going to make that mistake again, and because one of the perks of being the clan who brought a literal war hero back from the literal dead is that you don't need to worry about locking yourself out of future potential political alliances. (Jiraiya may or may not be appointed Clan Head upon his return. I think we can probably keep the title and deputize him to handle some of the more annoying stuff.)
- He doesn't marry her and admits that he's unlikely to do so, and that it's because of personal reasons. We expel him from the clan and race Tsunade to see who sends him back to the afterlife first. He is disgraced and shamed. We then reformat the world (again) to one where Mari is confident in her abilities to find at least one fulfilling long-term romantic relationship.
I have excluded possibilities like 'Jiraiya wants to marry Mari but can't because of political realities' because EJ has gone on the record that Jiraiya won't come back brain-damaged and that's the only reason he'd say something stupid like that given that he's otherwise intelligent. The point of having power is that you get to do things with it. If opening a portal to the afterlife and dragging Leaf's most beloved contemporary figure back from the dead does not win us sufficient political power to no longer concern ourselves with petty affairs like marriage alliances, then our next step is to track down Ami. Mari is correct that power in any arena can be exchanged for power in any other arena, just at some potentially-unfavourable ratio, and Ami's superpower is the ability to always, always secure a favourable exchange rate. She will be more than happy to help out.
And if that doesn't work, we go and found our own Hidden Village - actually I think we should found a Obvious, Visible Village to make the point that we are no longer open to the idea of doing things as they've traditionally been done in any capacity - and let everyone know that they can be on the side of death-cheating Scroll-toting Dragon-slaying kind-hearted people who really just want everyone to be free to live a decent life, or they can oppose us and our creativity.
I tried to turn that sentiment into an omake but couldn't quite find the words. I might still at a later date.
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Considering his personal power and clout as a Sannin and the founder of Clan Gouketsu this seems optimistic. Also I'm not actually willing to hop onto the 'grar you didn't do romance how I wanted with my loved ones, I do violence now' cliche train. If things don't work out between him and Mari then that sucks but there are a lot of potential good reasons for that.
As far as the EJ pledge, I want to note that memory loss is explicitly not brain damage for this. We have no guarantee that Jiraiya actually remembers the last decade or so of his life (or any other period of time you care to imagine), and I would consider that a valid dealbreaker for himself and/or Mari. We have a guarantee that he won't act like he has dementia.
Speaking for myself, his relationship with Mari is their business, and I care far more about having his political support for Uplift and sharing his personal power/knowledge with Hazou than I do about the particulars of their "marriage".
Which is to say, I do not support this. We need him, I don't think alienating him over this is worth it.
Ideally, yes. I continue to consider necromancy a goal and the existing rift continues to be the most practical way to approach necromancy.
Same here, it is less of a priority than getting something that will kill Akatsuki. Far less of one, in fact, but still worth pursuing.
- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I love Jiraiya but if he doesn't swear a binding oath to give us literally all his lore and knowledge as a ferryman's fee with a decent down payment prior to resurrection then I have reservations about bringing him back.
I think it's overwhelmingly likely that he immediately recognizes the magnitude of our achievement and pledges himself up our cause, and apologizes profusely for dying before he was able to make good on his promises, but if he isn't willing to follow through on the material terms of commitments he benefited from immensely and made freely, who's to say he doesn't welsh again?
We've spent a lot of time getting screwed and played by people who knew that we'd prioritize the public good. If we open a portal to the afterlife and Jiraiya doesn't promptly signal understanding that he owes us literally the rest of his life, I think it's time to re-evaluate how we handle negotiations. He is not coming back as clan head. He is coming back as a member of the clan under our authority, and if that isn't acceptable to him then he can find his own damn way out of the afterlife.
I'm possibly conflating his willingness to marry Mari and his general willingness to keep his word, but the two are IMO at least correlated, given that his memory is intact.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
There is like no universe where we win here that doesn't result in us either having enough sociopolitical capital to trivially do shit like this pretty much whenever we want it, or result in us being able to do so trivially in like 1-2 calendar years.
We're in the end game now, the politics stuff is going to converge to trivial paperwork and "Okay, lets draw straws to see who gets to beat seven distinct colors of hell into Ritsuo's face this time."
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Dangle him over a pit of crocodiles
There's a long line of people willing to help us with this, starting with Mari and ending with the Toad Sages themselves
There is nothing stopping him from lying to us? He just says he'll do it and then is always too busy. Or better yet, aura blasts us for annoying him about it. Look, the fact of the matter is we can't compel him to share jack shit unless he wants to.
I think demanding this isn't going to get us what you want. If we want him to share his stuff we need to get him to see us as his family, extorting him at the gateway to the afterlife is going to do more harm than good.
- Location
- France
Raising J-man is worth is even if he doesn't become our absolute servant because his existence removes so many demands on our time. It's great.
Also at this point we have definitely proven our value and we can be 100% certain he won't be sacrificing us or stiffing us. We're not just a sealing genius, we're a RUNE genius.
Also at this point we have definitely proven our value and we can be 100% certain he won't be sacrificing us or stiffing us. We're not just a sealing genius, we're a RUNE genius.
- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I am suggesting this as a strategy if he acts in a way that suggests he isn't going to honour his previously-made commitments.
I am not suggesting extortion. I am suggesting that we ensure we're reasonably compensated for our labour and unique skillset, as we did previously with Skytowers, Skywalkers, and our other inventions/discoveries.
We need to invent a camera seal so we can capture the look on his face when he realizes that we actually cracked 3D sealing.
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- Location
- United States
Actually, we were cheated out of these. It's in my Book of Grudges.
- Location
- Washington, USA
Wouldn't that be a trivial variant of the illusion effect we already used to bait jaguars with a pile of sleeping dogs?
Hazo can claim seniority, since they technically joined Clan Goketsu at the same time, and Team Uplift will surely have spent less time missing than Jiraya spent dead. Or, if missions and strategic excitement are treated as more important than simple accumulation of calendar or subjective time... consider that Hazo led the clan under more different hokages than Jiraya did, and may even be able to take personal credit for more confirmed S-rank kills, if you consider that none of the big names who J-man tagged at the Battle of the Gods actually stayed down.
You can call it whatever you want, but demanding he tell us his secrets before we agree to rez him is like the definition of extortion. He's not gonna like it.
