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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be neutralized.
[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be reformed.
[X] Orochimaru is a bigger threat than Akatsuki.
Closer, at least, I dunno about bigger exactly but I do think we need to handle him somehow.
 
[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be neutralized, but the killing the Akatsuki are a higher priority.
 
not confident in the below but a possibility to think about.
i feel like if we end up going the method of convincing oro to do useful good actions. instead of doing the typical reformation stuff like giving him guilt for his actions. and compassion as a motivator to do good actions. instead we need to give him hope of a better world. that it can be achieved, and perhaps that it can be achieved with better methodologies than traditional ninja violence.
he feels like someone who gave up. who doesn't see a path on how he can improve the world (improve it in a big picture way. dissecting one less person is too insignificant in his mind). like how tsunade perhaps gave up on improving the world in efficient ways and focused on doing direct and unambiguous good.
he was with akatsuki. perhaps it was for power or to betray them. perhaps charismatic Pain gave him hope of a better world, only to be disheartened again when he saw the final plan.
when hazou tried to convince him of a better world he asked for evidence. and gave all his evidence of why it could not be done.

actually showing him such hope is difficult. ways like the peace of akatsuki's AMITY actually being maintained for a few years, or hazou giving personal examples (like if we resolve the dog leopard conflict using peaceful methods, or kei the pangolin hyena conflict), or if the villages had accepted the Liberator, the Swamp Village, and Isan and benefited from the ensuing alliances. if they haven't already been missed, or out of our hands as missing nin, then they are difficult to do.
 
[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be reformed.
[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be neutralized.
[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be neutralized, then reformed from a position of safety.

I think there are two axes along which we can consider Oro states: prosocial-antisocial (to people in general) and aligned-opposed (to us, specifically). Currently, Oro is antisocial, but probably fairly neutral to us. I've made an alignment chart of Oro states and where they (in my opinion) sit as targets for reform; on the left column, "prosocial" means "willing to share techniques/collaborate/generally help people", "antisocial" means "continues to torture people, threaten kidnapping if not appeased, etc.", and "Neutral" means "doesn't torture people but continues working on only his own goals, with deals rare and requiring very high-value trades from the other party". (Obviously this is a simplification, but I think it's a helpful one.)

AlignedNeutralOpposed
ProsocialIdeal. Oro joins Uplift and turns his talents to our cause, sharing his techniques with us and generally becoming a member of our family.Acceptable. Oro doesn't especially care about us, but is willing to help and is receptive to deals, allowing us to continue to extract value from him and potentially move to the prosocial-aligned state.Tolerable. Oro dislikes us, but is in general prosocial and may be willing to repair our relationship in future. Difficult to see how we would arrive at this state, assuming our actions are responsible for reforming Oro - Oro being prosocial implies willingness to work with us even if we annoyed him in the process of reforming him.
NeutralAcceptable. Oro is positively inclined towards us and is not torturing people, but is still primarily focused on his own goals.Acceptable. Oro continues to pursue his own goals, but is not a danger to us or anyone else in doing so.Tolerable. Oro dislikes us, but doesn't care about us enough to engage in social manipulations against us and will not break the law to e.g. kidnap us.
AntisocialSuboptimal, but better than we have now. We are safe from Oro and may even benefit from him, but the rest of Leaf isn't. May lay groundwork for future reformation. However, difficult to see how we'd reach this state.Current state. Oro tortures people, but is not inclined to go after us specifically and will listen to us if we offer mutually beneficial deals.Imminent crisis. Oro is still antisocial and is personally opposed to us; our lifespan is now as long as it takes him to come up with a way to kill us that's deniable to the Hokage.

Of these states, I think really any of the non-antisocial states would be sufficient to designate neutralizing Oro as not worth the effort. If someone gave us a one-time-only-chance to press a button labelled "kill Oro", I'd be tempted to press it in the neutral non-aligned states (and maybe the neutral aligned state too, depending on the details), because of the risk that Oro changes his mind in future; but the non-antisocial states would be sufficient for me not to vote to pull the trigger on a risky Oro-neutralization plan. In the antisocial-aligned state, whether I would approve of the plan depends very heavily on how susceptible Oro seems to further reformation and exactly how risky the plan is; Neutral-Aligned Oro is better than dead Oro, but if the choice is between 99% chance of dead Oro and 20% chance of Neutral-Aligned Oro, I'm taking the dead Oro option.

(I considered whether there's a precommitment issue in here, but I don't think there is. Us committing to kill Oro in future when we're strong enough will not move the needle for him, except possibly to induce him to kill us first, because he (almost certainly) thinks the chance of us both being able to kill him and actually going through with it is so low as to not be worth considering. There might be a notional precommitment on the part of Leaf to kill people like him, but if there was, it was waived by whichever Hokage accepted him back into Leaf in exchange for his loyalty (such as it is); and it might not extend to S-rankers. And there probably isn't a coherent enough "humanity" in this setting for it to have a precommitment to kill him, even in the notional "if we had a chance to discuss it we'd agree on this, so I'm going to act as if it's already agreed" sense. So I don't think this is an issue for our decision-making.)
 
[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be reformed.
[X] Orochimaru is a big threat but not an existential risk the way Akatsuki is.

Bro is too motivated to keep the world intact for me to put him on the same scale as Akatsuki who just be doing crazy rituals they don't fully understand. And as smart as he is, he's just one guy (at the moment.)

As for the reforming thing, it's mostly just because I find it a more interesting direction for the story to take than putting him in space between worlds jail
 
[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be reformed.
[X] Orochimaru is a big threat but not an existential risk the way Akatsuki is.
 
[x] Orochimaru is a monster and should be reformed.

Though tbh I am mostly chill with the current status quo. He isn't being super murdery and is generally helpful.
 
[X] Orochimaru is a monster and should be neutralized.
- [X] "Reformed" counts as a form of neutralized.

[X] Orochimaru is a big long-term threat but also a short-term ally. Our goal is to defeat the Akatsuki without empowering Orochimaru to the point of unstoppability.
- [X] We aren't doing a good job of this(dragon biosealing, Runesmithing), but we can still clutch this by securing Itachi's soulkill sword.
 
Oneiros said:
[x] Orochimaru is a monster and should be reformed.

Though tbh I am mostly chill with the current status quo. He isn't being super murdery and is generally helpful.
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Sure, it's chill *right now*. Like many sources of x-risk, it'll keep being chill right until it suddenly extremely isn't.

Orochimaru's ultimate goal is to ascend to omnipotence, or as close to it as he can achieve.
We have him our best argument for why, if he wins, letting other independent agents exist might be useful to him, and he laughed us off and vehemently disagreed.

His long term goals include everyone else being dead or extremely throughly disempowered. He is not open to long term coexistance.
We will eventually need to stop him.
 
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Kyreneryk said:
@eaglejarl @Paperclipped @Velorien Does Hazō know anything about a. the availability of spacetime ninjutsu and b. how difficult they are to make? They seem to be extremely rare - I think we've basically only seen Conjura and Oro use them, and Oro's use was in that possibly-not-canon interlude of him escaping Akatsuki - but given that they're non-elemental, it's not obvious why that should be the case if all you need to make them is high enough TH. Does Hazō think there might be some kind of stunt you need in order to make and/or use them, or some other barrier to them being more widespread than "big-number TH"?
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Hazō's impression is that space-time ninjutsu are similar to sealless ninjutsu. The typical ninja not only doesn't know the TH theory behind them, but can't even explain what space-time is or what it means to manipulate it (unlike, say, throwing fireballs at people). It takes an elite technique hacker to have not only the technical skill but the ambition to attempt to create one of their own. Furthermore, anyone who creates or otherwise comes into possession of such a ninjutsu will absolutely keep it as a personal trump card instead of allowing it to proliferate, keeping them rare. No doubt, Namikaze Minato created a number of space-time techniques while building his way up to the S-rank pinnacle of the art that was the Flying Thunder God Technique, yet Hazō has never heard of a single person using them.

On a mechanical level, if there are special requirements for creating space-time ninjutsu beyond "be really good", Hazō's TH is far too low to identify them.
 
Velorien said:
Hazō's impression is that space-time ninjutsu are similar to sealless ninjutsu. The typical ninja not only doesn't know the TH theory behind them, but can't even explain what space-time is or what it means to manipulate it (unlike, say, throwing fireballs at people). It takes an elite technique hacker to have not only the technical skill but the ambition to attempt to create one of their own. Furthermore, anyone who creates or otherwise comes into possession of such a ninjutsu will absolutely keep it as a personal trump card instead of allowing it to proliferate, keeping them rare. No doubt, Namikaze Minato created a number of space-time techniques while building his way up to the S-rank pinnacle of the art that was the Flying Thunder God Technique, yet Hazō has never heard of a single person using them.

On a mechanical level, if there are special requirements for creating space-time ninjutsu beyond "be really good", Hazō's TH is far too low to identify them.
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Thanks! That's honestly more than I expected Hazō to know, so I'm happy with this; something to revisit once we get TH 40, perhaps.
 
Kyreneryk said:
Thanks! That's honestly more than I expected Hazō to know, so I'm happy with this; something to revisit once we get TH 40, perhaps.
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PONWOG it helps that Hazō does have an idea of what space-time is because of sealing, so he can see both the lay and the professional perspectives (though he has no clue how anyone can influence it without the incredible power of seals).
 
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