Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

[strange_person]

If I've understood you correctly, that doesn't cast Hazou's behaviour as valorous self-sacrifice, it's still minimizing-our-odds-of-losing-the-game.

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If, in Saving Private Ryan or similar, somebody considered their available tactical options to be:
a) enemy tank continues advancing, high risk my entire squad is wiped, mission fails, or
b) I run up with a sticky bomb, maybe get shot in the process, much better chance buddies survive and/or succeed
...and picked B, is that not generally still regarded as some meaningful degree of valorous self-sacrifice, even though they'd die with higher probability in scenario A, just a few minutes later?

Would you explain why you disagree? I can't see how it's possible to choose something that goes against your own preferences at the time. You might regret some choices later, but in the moment you act according to your own desires/instincts.

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That's just Executive functions - Wikipedia , though, not what people usually mean when they talk about "altruism" or "selfishness." Those two concepts are rooted in preindustrial resource-allocation / prisoner's-dilemma problems.
When somebody advances the interests of their own group, an allied group, or neutrals who might reasonably become allies, to their own short-term detriment and without explicit promise of compensation, that's called altruism, and regarded as virtuous because, in the grand scheme of things, people like that are very useful to have around, but sometimes need extra maintenance to survive those "own short-term detriment" phases. Jimmy Stewart's character in It's A Wonderful Life is the standard pop-culture example.
Conversely, when somebody interacts with nominal allies in negative-sum ways, to their own short-term benefit, that's called selfishness and regarded very badly even when not otherwise breaking any explicit rules because, in a marginal-subsistence context, such a pattern of behavior poses a potential threat to the whole group's survival.
In both cases modern "benefit" and "detriment" often get measured in terms of money, or fuzzier things like pleasure or status or political goals, but it originally meant food (or other rivalrous, labor-intensive necessities of survival, such as clothing), and the further away it gets from things which could be cashed out into food, the less coherent the logic.

 

[T_of_A]

What does that make of Hazō's morality, then? In the end, most of the decisions that drive Hazō's actions are made of player calculation and negotiation, driven by pragmatic game goals of power progression and preferable world-states, and adjusted at various times and to various extents by moral concerns and by care for the welfare of particular characters the player base has come to be invested in.

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What a sad thing to read. Feels bad. It's also a very sad thing to believe, IRL. Our greatest strengths are cooperation, empathy and altruism, and I recommend changing your worldview until you can believe that they exist again. "Look for the helpers in a crisis" is a healthier outlook that makes life better and easier to endure, even if you still feel times of anger and despair while Doom scrolling through life.


Anyway, back to MFD:
It also feels like you consider any outcome resulting from a vote and debate to be un-altrustic. In that case I recommend you write Hazoupilot doing more "real altruism" to match all the self-sacrificing "fake altruism" we keep voting for. You literally just wrote a chapter about how our family is reacting to our self-sacrifice.
Just... what ?!?

The sensible long-term Uplift play would be to try to defeat Akatsuki without committing suicide. You know, like what Orochimaru is doing. Instead we decided to accept bioseals that could well give us a date worse than death because doing so makes victory more likely for everyone else. That's altruism ! Even I this setting full of lunatics, that's ninja altruism ! Not only should you be viewing Hazou as altruistic, but the NPCs should be too !

But however much Hazō cares, he will never deliberately give up his life, for an NPC or for a cause, and end the quest in its current form

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How do you suggest we do such a thing ? We have repeatedly voted to get into deadly fights to help NPCs, including the cave battle that delayed our "saving the world" mission by MONTHS to save an NPC so irrelevant I can't even remember his name.
But apparently that doesn't count because there was a chance of winning when we took that risk. So what do you require ? A mid-combat vote to literally jump in front of a kunai for Kei ? Only you as a QM can make that possible. So far it's not even been an option.

 

[Cariyaga]

I would like to, also, say that whatever disagreements I have (and, I'm quite sure, the others as well), they come from a place of caring both about the quest and you, Velorien.

 

[Kyreneryk]

Would you explain why you disagree? I can't see how it's possible to choose something that goes against your own preferences at the time. You might regret some choices later, but in the moment you act according to your own desires/instincts.

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As @strange_person said, executive function. Humans have the capacity to experience motivation to do things while simultaneously also being motivated to find a way not to do them. Think of washing up after a meal; you do it, because you don't want to have dirty cooking implements piling up and you'll eventually want to reuse them, but if you could find a way to not do it while still solving those issues and not incurring other comparable ones, you would. (Unless you explicitly enjoy washing up for its own sake, I guess.) So you're acting against your preferences in the moment, because you know it's necessary to achieve a future state that you want.

You could argue that that experience is part of your preferences, but that's just a semantic debate and starts running into the edges of the abstraction that is modelling people as agents at all (as opposed to merely very complex machines that can be deterministically modeled the same way as any other system). Personally, I think that as most people use the word, instrumental goals like "wash the dishes" probably don't fall under the category of 'preferences', precisely because we wouldn't do them if we didn't have to. (Contrast "play Minecraft", which doesn't accomplish any future goals and which one does for its own sake - that's probably actually serving some set of deeper desires like "experience novelty" or "seek out cognitive engagement", but I can't introspect deeply enough and don't know enough about how human minds work to say exactly what those desires are.)

There's a weird... philosophical argument, I suppose, though that doesn't feel like the right term... which I've seen in several unrelated places before. A reductio ad absurdum of altruism and/or free will which boils down to "well, you must have wanted / enjoyed that, as evidenced by the fact you chose to do it at all, so it doesn't count." Hazo does the kinds of things that Hazo prefers, therefore Hazo is not altruistic, without needing to know any actual specifics.

I strongly disagree with that position, but it hasn't got much exposed surface for logical argument to engage with.

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Honestly, this sounds like a semantic debate about what the word "altruism" means. You could define altruism as doing something purely to benefit someone else without having yourself any drive to do it, in which case it's impossible by definition (you can't do something without some kind of drive to do it, that's what "drive to do something" means), but also the definition is IMO not very useful. You could define altruism as doing something that you don't 'want' to do (as described above) purely for someone else's benefit, in which case it's possible but fundamentally unstable because in that case your drive to figure out a way to not do the thing will eventually lead you to figure out that you can avoid doing the thing just by realizing that there's no reason for you to do it. Or, you could define altruism as doing something which you don't 'want' to do and which primarily benefits someone else but has indirect benefits to you, and that form of altruism is common - it's just enlightened self-interest. Or probably other options I haven't thought of (I haven't even brought up kin altruism and misfirings thereof, for example). Regardless, it doesn't seem like an argument about whether a fixed form of altruism is possible, because it seems to me that once you pin down a particular definition, the answer to the question of "is that possible" is then fairly straightforward.

 

[ContextBot]

Hazō doesn't know any of this, but we do, and it makes me instinctively dislike interpretations that portray him as selfless or self-sacrificing, because his role as the player character means he is not physically capable of being those things for real.

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Well yes.

はそう, while being kind of a misspelling of Hazou's name, can mean wide-mouthed ceramic vessel .

Poor little Iron Nerve puppet vessel, but it was always in the name.

(Just making a joke, but maybe someone should call Hazou my little teapot or something)

 

[Veedrac]

but it's not like we get a +3 to Sealing from throwing tremendous piles of money into projects that benefit civilians we'll never meet

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something something roads should be onscreen more

I would have few complaints if this became a civil engineering quest. I personally find figuring out how to use shinies to do cool things a lot more interesting than getting the shinies themselves.

 

[strange_person]

Or, you could define altruism as doing something which you don't 'want' to do and which primarily benefits someone else but has indirect benefits to you, and that form of altruism is common - it's just enlightened self-interest.

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The type people seem to prefer most is when benefits to the doer are so indirect as to be washed out by background noise, "now i get to live in the kind of world where these things happen." Cost-benefit calculations focused on the wider community, personal concerns limited to "will I destroy myself, or otherwise cause some worse problem than I'm trying to solve." Thus why donating a kidney to a close ally or family member is considered meritorious, but the same to an anonymous stranger attracts suspicion - too much risk to the donor without corresponding gain to a tribe of intuitively comprehensible size.

 

[Velorien]

I feel like this is literally just incorrect.

Hazou took the bioseals from Orochimaru to save the world, perhaps from the QM side this doesn't look like deliberately risking the quest and Hazou's life to prevent Akatsuki from taking over the world, but from the player side it definitely does. We did what we could to mitigate that risk, but risk we did take.

We are literally potentially sacrificing Uplift and Hazou to defeat Akatsuki. It seems obvious to me that's what we're doing. I guess I just don't know how to put a finer point on it than that.

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I voted to get Oro's bioseals with the understanding that there is a good chance it will lead to Hazo's death. Pretty sure I was not the only one to do so. Beating the Akatsuki is more important than Hazo staying alive.

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The players have decided that the Dragons eating the Human Path and Pain taking over the world are absolute loss conditions. Given this premise, risking Hazō's death to prevent them isn't heroism; it's common sense, because if they happen, he and Uplift (both the team and the objective) are as good as dead anyway.

Can you confirm that my reading of the last line is correct: You do not view Hazou as his own character, but an extension of what we vote? Because that, uh... recontextualizes a lot of what I understand about this quest.

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That's something of a false dichotomy. Hazō does what you vote, and his characterisation is based on those votes (and their patterns over time). Hazō is his own character, but he can only be so to the extent that it is consistent with the winning plan. If a winning plan specifies something out of character for Hazō, but not so greatly out of character as to trigger a Hazōpilot override, then he will always do it. Outside the context of the plans, he is fully his own character, but that's true by definition.

I know many many people who have
sacrificed their beloved PC in a DnD game.

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I've done so myself. I would think twice, however, if that sacrifice also negatively impacted dozens of other players and their years of investment. Quests are a different beast from tabletop, and this quest is especially distinctive for how much effort and investment the players have collectively poured into Hazō.

What a sad thing to read. Feels bad. It's also a very sad thing to believe, IRL. Our greatest strengths are cooperation, empathy and altruism, and I recommend changing your worldview until you can believe that they exist again. "Look for the helpers in a crisis" is a healthier outlook that makes life better and easier to endure, even if you still feel times of anger and despair while Doom scrolling through life.

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I certainly don't believe this is how people think in real life. I'm not sure how you concluded that from my post about valorisation of Hazō by the players controlling him.

The sensible long-term Uplift play would be to try to defeat Akatsuki without committing suicide. You know, like what Orochimaru is doing. Instead we decided to accept bioseals that could well give us a date worse than death because doing so makes victory more likely for everyone else. That's altruism ! Even I this setting full of lunatics, that's ninja altruism ! Not only should you be viewing Hazou as altruistic, but the NPCs should be too !

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I do not have the impression that the players believe Akatsuki can be reliably defeated without beating Hidan's blood sense with bioseals, or with a long-term play that does not involve killing the Akatsuki at O'Uzu and taking the rift. Why should Hazō?

(Also, I know it's a typo, but the idea that the true evil effect of the bioseals is a "date worse than death" with Orochimaru is delightful.)

For the rest, I think I require additional spoons to figure out how to make my meaning clear.

 

[T_of_A]

do not have the impression that the players believe Akatsuki can be reliably defeated without beating Hidan's blood sense with bioseals, or with a long-term play that does not involve killing the Akatsuki at O'Uzu and taking the rift. Why should Hazō?

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Orochimaru claims he would have tried to fight them alone if we hadn't shown up. He clearly knows it would have been a desperate long shot, and yet...
In the same vein, we could have attacked without the bioseals and hoped Hidan wasn't there. The rational outcome in service of self-preservation would have been taking the longshot because the costs of failure were irrelevant and the costs of all other choices were unacceptable.
But seeing as our goal is instead *saving the world*, we decided to deliberately accept a potential fate worse than death to increase our odds of saving the world.
That's altruism.

 

[Noumero]

The players have decided that the Dragons eating the Human Path and Pain taking over the world are absolute loss conditions. Given this premise, risking Hazō's death to prevent them isn't heroism; it's common sense, because if they happen, he and Uplift (both the team and the objective) are as good as dead anyway.

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I do not have the impression that the players believe Akatsuki can be reliably defeated without beating Hidan's blood sense with bioseals, or with a long-term play that does not involve killing the Akatsuki at O'Uzu and taking the rift. Why should Hazō?

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Um.

The apocalypses that we fear the Dragons or Pain causing are abstract, distant, impersonal, long-term threats. When given the choice between doing nothing and paying steep personal costs/risking death in order to address such threats, the standard human thing to do is to do nothing. Rationalize why the threats aren't real, or come up with galaxy-brained reasons why doing nothing is actually the best way to address them, or curl up into a ball and shut out the world, or just kinda pretend you don't see the issue and go about your life.

The qualities necessary to override that standard response and pay the short-term costs in the name of doing the right thing are the heroic qualities. Heroism doesn't stop being heroism just because it makes sense.

Yes, doing the non-heroic thing sometimes doesn't make sense. Counterintuitively to standard narratives, non-heroism is often irrational. But the baseline human being is precisely irrational in this manner, and inasmuch as "heroic" is an adjective used to describe someone who deviates from a baseline human in a specific way, "acting uncommonly rational in a given class of situations" is a reasonable way to define it.

 

[ProperAttorney]

The players have decided that the Dragons eating the Human Path and Pain taking over the world are absolute loss conditions. Given this premise, risking Hazō's death to prevent them isn't heroism; it's common sense, because if they happen, he and Uplift (both the team and the objective) are as good as dead anyway

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This seems like a very strange take in which actions are only considered Heroic™️ if they don't make common sense? Is is Superman not heroic when he fights villains that want to destroy Human society at Great threat to his own life, just because he considers them winning to be bad? Was Tony Stark not heroic when he gave his own life to defeat Thanos, because he considered Thanos winning to be a loss condition?

Is it only heroic if the Bad Guy winning wouldn't affect you, but you sacrifice yourself anyway?

 

[RandomOTP]

"Hazou and the playerbase are not altruistic/heroic" is certainly a take.

I'm going to, with affectionate exasperation, chalk it up to depression posting, and disregard it accordingly.

Hope all is well, across the pond. I know it's not so hot over here, or in many other places. We love and respect you all, and these disagreements are ultimately rooted in that same love and respect we have for you, and the artistic literature we've spent many wonderful years creating, together, as a community.

 

[Sir Stompy]

The players have decided that the Dragons eating the Human Path and Pain taking over the world are absolute loss conditions. Given this premise, risking Hazō's death to prevent them isn't heroism; it's common sense, because if they happen, he and Uplift (both the team and the objective) are as good as dead anyway.

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First of all, I think you're painting with too broad a brush here. They aren't absolute loss conditions in my opinion and (I think) many others. Or they weren't before we went missing from Leaf. The Dragons especially, I think, had a good chance of never coming to the Human Path, or just being destroyed after multiple other Clans were killed.

But I think this is still a very silly definition of heroism! By this standard Frodo and Sam aren't heroic because they thought Sauron would eventually conquer the Shire! Heroism can be purposeful, it can be directed, just because you personally reap the benefit of the world being saved doesn't mean millions who did nothing don't get it too. Heroism is more about taking action yourself than personally not benefitting from it - that doesn't disqualify heroes, almost all heroes (who don't die) benefit from their heroism in some way.

I think heroism is more of a numbers game for me (and others, but I can only speak for me), if you benefit from defeating the Dark Lord, defeating him can still be heroic! Others collectively benefit much more.

Hazou is still heroic for opposing Akatsuki and the Dragons because the 7P Clans saved and the nameless civvies otherwise murdered by Hidan far outnumber him personally.

 

[strange_person]

This seems like a very strange take in which actions are only considered Heroic™️ if they don't make common sense? Is is Superman not heroic when he fights villains that want to destroy Human society at Great threat to his own life, just because he considers them winning to be bad? Was Tony Stark not heroic when he gave his own life to defeat Thanos, because he considered Thanos winning to be a loss condition?

Is it only heroic if the Bad Guy winning wouldn't affect you, but you sacrifice yourself anyway?

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It's only heroic (according to certain intuitive standards) if you take the correct action without having done the math.

 

[Lord Marshal]

First of all, I think you're painting with too broad a brush here. They aren't absolute loss conditions in my opinion and (I think) many others. Or they weren't before we went missing from Leaf. The Dragons especially, I think, had a good chance of never coming to the Human Path, or just being destroyed after multiple other Clans were killed.

But I think this is still a very silly definition of heroism! By this standard Frodo and Sam aren't heroic because they thought Sauron would eventually conquer the Shire! Heroism can be purposeful, it can be directed, just because you personally reap the benefit of the world being saved doesn't mean millions who did nothing don't get it too. Heroism is more about taking action yourself than personally not benefitting from it - that doesn't disqualify heroes, almost all heroes (who don't die) benefit from their heroism in some way.

I think heroism is more of a numbers game for me (and others, but I can only speak for me), if you benefit from defeating the Dark Lord, defeating him can still be heroic! Others collectively benefit much more.

Hazou is still heroic for opposing Akatsuki and the Dragons because the 7P Clans saved and the nameless civvies otherwise murdered by Hidan far outnumber him personally.

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But the point is that we're not "normal people", we're players in a game with win conditions. That's the point, "Hazou" is heroic and so on. But for us it's, quite literally, a game. We have objectives, even if partly decided by ourselves, and we want to realize those objective.
The context of us playing a quest does change the analysis of Hazou character.
An example of this difference is EM. Hazou didn't do that on purpose, and was a desperate person put in an horrible situation.The hivemind? 100% did it on purpose and wanted the nuke for years.
The hivemind does, in fact, add context that changes the situation when you analyze the whole picture.

 

[Sir Stompy]

But the point is that we're not "normal people", we're players in a game with win conditions. That's the point, "Hazou" is heroic and so on. But for us it's, quite literally, a game. We have objectives, even if partly decided by ourselves, and we want to realize those objective.
The context of us playing a quest does change the analysis of Hazou character.
An example of this difference is EM. Hazou didn't do that on purpose, and was a desperate person put in an horrible situation.The hivemind? 100% did it on purpose and wanted the nuke for years.
The hivemind does, in fact, add context that changes the situation when you analyze the whole picture.

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Ain't nobody (to my knowledge) ever claimed we the players were heroic for playing the game.

I don't really get your point about EM, I don't think we or Hazou covered ourselves in glory there. Not our finest moment. If you're saying it invalidates the rest of what Hazou's done, then I disagree.

 

[Velorien]

But the point is that we're not "normal people", we're players in a game with win conditions. That's the point, "Hazou" is heroic and so on. But for us it's, quite literally, a game. We have objectives, even if partly decided by ourselves, and we want to realize those objective.
The context of us playing a quest does change the analysis of Hazou character.
An example of this difference is EM. Hazou didn't do that on purpose, and was a desperate person put in an horrible situation.The hivemind? 100% did it on purpose and wanted the nuke for years.
The hivemind does, in fact, add context that changes the situation when you analyze the whole picture.

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There's a useful analogy that occurs to me--not for Marked for Death, but for the kind of issue we are discussing. Suppose two people are playing the same RPG, or perhaps the same immersive aim, with similar characters making similar choices. However, one is playing with quicksave/quickload, ready to use them when an action turns out to have unacceptable consequences. The other is playing on ironman mode, where consequences are irreversible and a single death ends the game. To what extent are these people playing the same game? To what extent are they having the same experience and creating the same story? Supposing they are roleplaying heroes, repeatedly risking failure or death for trying to do the right thing, is there a difference between how heroic the two player characters are?

(Again, I'm not implying that Marked for Death is like one of these. I'm raising the question of the relationship between in-universe and out-of-universe context to decisions.)

 

[faflec]

There's a useful analogy that occurs to me--not for Marked for Death, but for the kind of issue we are discussing. Suppose two people are playing the same RPG, or perhaps the same immersive aim, with similar characters making similar choices. However, one is playing with quicksave/quickload, ready to use them when an action turns out to have unacceptable consequences. The other is playing on ironman mode, where consequences are irreversible and a single death ends the game. To what extent are these people playing the same game? To what extent are they having the same experience and creating the same story? Supposing they are roleplaying heroes, repeatedly risking failure or death for trying to do the right thing, is there a difference between how heroic the two player characters are?

(Again, I'm not implying that Marked for Death is like one of these. I'm raising the question of the relationship between in-universe and out-of-universe context to decisions.)

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[X] Inject ourselves with DETERMINATION

 

[Unaligned Player]

The players have decided that the Dragons eating the Human Path and Pain taking over the world are absolute loss conditions. Given this premise, risking Hazō's death to prevent them isn't heroism; it's common sense, because if they happen, he and Uplift (both the team and the objective) are as good as dead anyway.

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Y'know, I think I can see the logic here. Doing these incredibly risky things means there's a chance of success and not doing them guarantees the situation's failure, at least from the general player perspective. Therefore this is a thing of basic sense. If that's what you're getting at, I can grok that, and even kinda agree with the underlying principal though that may be self-depreciation and general disappointment with people talking.

 

[Halil]

There's a useful analogy that occurs to me--not for Marked for Death, but for the kind of issue we are discussing. Suppose two people are playing the same RPG, or perhaps the same immersive aim, with similar characters making similar choices. However, one is playing with quicksave/quickload, ready to use them when an action turns out to have unacceptable consequences. The other is playing on ironman mode, where consequences are irreversible and a single death ends the game. To what extent are these people playing the same game? To what extent are they having the same experience and creating the same story? Supposing they are roleplaying heroes, repeatedly risking failure or death for trying to do the right thing, is there a difference between how heroic the two player characters are?

(Again, I'm not implying that Marked for Death is like one of these. I'm raising the question of the relationship between in-universe and out-of-universe context to decisions.)

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Is this example not malformed from the start? If you change the conditions of play, you change the player's behavior. In this case the simplest examples would be that ironman players are by and large more cautious, tend to take longer (routes, time, whatever) to increase their odds moving forward, etc.

So to then ask, given different conditions at the beginning of your example, whether player behavior will change seems an unconstructive exercise. In any case, the answer is yes: if you change the mechanics, you should expect a change in behavior.

The second problem is here: "To what extent are they having the same experience and creating the same story?"

Who do you mean by "they", and whose experience and story are we talking about? I don't ask this to be pedantic, but because it seems central to the issue at hand.

The experience of the player vis a vis the game is not the experience of the character vis a vis "life", and the "created story" of the character is not the "created story" of every other character. These are by definition. By conflating them we can arrive at silly outcomes like:
1. Hazou did nothing heroic because you enjoyed it,
2. Hazou did nothing heroic because you decided it,
3. Hazou did nothing heroic because you thought you could succeed at it, and
4. The impact of Hazou's actions on the world and inhabitants of MfD cannot matter to said inhabitants because MfD is a game.

The player not risking life and limb does not make the hero unheroic.

 

[Velorien]

So to then ask, given different conditions at the beginning of your example, whether player behavior will change seems an unconstructive exercise. In any case, the answer is yes: if you change the mechanics, you should expect a change in behavior.

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I don't believe I ever asked anything about player behaviour. In fact, the exact opposite. The whole point of the experiment is to ask what changes if the background context is different while the in-game behaviour remains the same.

Who do you mean by "they", and whose experience and story are we talking about? I don't ask this to be pedantic, but because it seems central to the issue at hand.

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They the players. That was why I used the immersive sim as a better example: because they famously generate emergent narratives for the player rather than only the character, unlike an RPG with a linear story.

 

[Halil]

I don't believe I ever asked anything about player behaviour. In fact, the exact opposite. The whole point of the experiment is to ask what changes if the background context is different while the in-game behaviour remains the same.


They the players. That was why I used the immersive sim as a better example: because they famously generate emergent narratives for the player rather than only the character, unlike an RPG with a linear story.

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I see.

As to your first point, I believe the answer is clear: mechanics determine behavior. (That fact, when combined with the premise of your example precluding it, is why I said it was malformed.)

To your second point: The experience of the player, from the perspective of the player character and everyone in the same world, is irrelevant. From the perspective of the player, it is central. The player does not exist to the characters, even though the characters may "exist" to us.

To conclude: The qualities of player experience do not add to remove from the evaluation of character heroism because the player does not exist as far as anything in setting is concerned.

As I said in my first post, conflating such viewpoints leads to untenable conclusions.

 

[coldcutconvict]

First-degree heroism.
Any intentional heroism that is willful and premeditated with benevolence aforethought.

Second-degree heroism.
Any intentional heroism that is not premeditated or planned. A situation in which the hero intends only to inflict serious bodily harm, knowing this could result in heroism but with no specific intent to hero, constitutes depraved-heart heroism, which can be considered as second-degree heroism.

Voluntary manslaughter savior.
Sometimes called act of valor heroism and informally called third–degree heroism, this is any intentional heroism that involves no prior intent to hero and which was committed under such circumstances that would "cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally inspired". Both this and second-degree heroism are committed on the spot under a spur-of-the-moment choice, but the two differ in the magnitude of the circumstances surrounding the deed. For example, saving someone from a burning building would ordinarily constitute second-degree heroism. If that person was a significant other, however, it may be voluntary mansavior.

Involuntary manslaughter savior.
Heroism that stems from a lack of intention to cause good but involving an intentional act of negligence, which may or may not be premeditated, leading to heroism. Note that the "unintentional" element here refers to the lack of intent to bring about the heroism. All three deeds above feature an intent to hero, whereas involuntary mansavior is "unintentional", because the hero did not intend for good to result from their intentional actions. If there is a presence of intention it relates only to the intent to cause a valorous act which brings about the heroism, but not an intention to bring about the heroism itself.

 

[RandomX2]

I have no idea what anyone is talking about ngl.

Is there a question being brought up? Is it "Is Hazou a hero?" 'Cuz I don't think it really matters. Hazou is Hazou, we all kinda get his vibes at this point. Leader-ish in both good and bad ways, wants the world overall to be better, cares for fam, sorta monofocused but also sorta ADHD. Sometimes that makes him look heroic or altruistic. I dunno the proper definition of altruistic and I don't really care to go down into the weeds for it. Overall he's a good-aligned guy, with some nuance or exceptions to it like what's gonna happen with Moon.

Don't think anyone should spend more spoons on it though, imo it's not actually that important and there are better things to focus on.

I have two thoughts that most might disagree with since it contradicts like, the entire premise of the quest over the years, but fuck it I still think it's the right play:

1) Breaks: QMs + players, everyone talking about lack of spoons. I think the riftwar is last-arc material. I know you've had a fixed schedule as a non-negotiable forever but my suggestion is to say change that and take a break. Who cares if it ends up being months or years? Do what Bleach did and just let the content and ideas cook and come back amazing. Bleach is balling rn, I think MfD could do the same. Current format just ain't it for me.

2) Fun Over Simulation: Change the fundamental core and basis of the quest for the last arc. Make fun more important than simulating a realistic world.

Unsure if anyone has made those two points already but that's my preference on what I'd like to see!

 

[RandomOTP]

Sometimes that makes him look heroic or altruistic.

Click to shrink...

Ngl, I misread that as "...or autistic" and my first thought wasn't "oops, I misread that," but "damn, he's just like us, fr fr."