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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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I think Mari expects Hazou to get himself killed and for Jiraiya to let* the rest of them go, so she's ignoring Hazou to keep herself and the rest of her team from being dragged down with him.

Us.

Whatever.

*Terms and Conditions apply
 
I'm not convinced that we have enough tells to actually solve this puzzle.

Are we in an illusion? Possibly. It's not safe to try dispelling.
Is the Legendary Spymaster so inept that he can't see our true motives and considers us a real threat instead of clumsy-tongued? I doubt it, but Ino seems to be responding that way.
I expect our team members to be angry at us, but in the past such anger has taken the form of yelling, lectures, or stabbing. Ignoring is not the usual expression of our failure, and this appears to be previously coordinated.
I need an hypothesis which explains all these before I support any action.

Let us suppose, as we have before, that J is not incompetent. He knows exactly what we meant and is forced to act by the phrasing we used.
Let us also assume Ino is not incompetent. Her performance in our defense, and telling us to piss off, are moves she is making, not irrational spite.
If J is observed to not respond to something that could be perceived as a threat, he loses favor with those who benefit from the threat interpretation. We suspect based on summoning the guards he is not free from observation.
This analysis is incomplete, but I'm at work and have to stop for now.
Before any plan making, I think we should be spending time on more WTF figuring out.

List all relevant facts first, no interpretations.
Explain all the facts first. Missing a clue and wht it's there could kill us.
 
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Personally, I'm guessing this is a Root issue. Konoha has sleepers and Kabuto is one of them, Jaraiya knows this. He locked us up to keep us away from the general public.

He doesn't want us dead, but he may need to kill us.
 
rkyeun said:
I I doubt it, but Ino seems to be responding that way.
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I assume you meant Inoue Mari-sensei, not the canon character Ino.

Before any plan making, I think we should be spending time on more WTF figuring out.
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We already went over this many times. All that happened is that we basically went in circles trying to figure out things.

So, we are choosing instead to respond to the situation at hand, at what is in front of us, at the surface level.

Jiraiya is threatening to kill us, so we made a plan based on that.

faflec said:
Seriously, what part of "MfD ≠ Canon" does nobody understand?
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We are badly contaminated by canon knowledge. At worst, they are actively misleading, and at best, they are a useful guide. We have no way to distinguish which is which.
 
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faflec said:
We don't know that.

At all.

Seriously, what part of "MfD ≠ Canon" does nobody understand?
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Eh. I know it's not canon, but I'm trying to think of anything that would explain this sort of overreaction.

I mean, we went from this "If you trust the guy, fine, you'd know him better. But if you're not even going to check if he's a threat, then you're putting my friend/girlfriend in danger. And we'll go pretty far to keep her safe.", to jailed in under a minute. That tells me something funky is going on here.
 
Ridiculously Average Guy said:
Eh. I know it's not canon, but I'm trying to think of anything that would explain this sort of overreaction.

I mean, we went from this "If you trust the guy, fine, you'd know him better. But if you're not even going to check if he's a threat, then you're putting my friend/girlfriend in danger. And we'll go pretty far to keep her safe.", to jailed in under a minute. That tells me something funky is going on here.
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I don't think it's funky.

Even if it was the case, it's not going to change anything, because we went over this....how many time?

Everybody got their own theories as to what is happening, but we all pretty much agree about what to do next.
 
Kiba said:
I don't think it's funky.

Even if it was the case, it's not going to change anything, because we went over this....how many time?

Everybody got their own theories as to what is happening, but we all pretty much agree about what to do next.
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If you mean "Get the fuck away from this madhouse ASAP" and then walk on eggshells when dealing with J in the future then yeah I'm onboard with that.
 
I don't think the "J is pissed off" theory and the "J wants to show internal political factions who want us out of Leaf that his emotions towards us aren't too soft" theories are mutually exclusive. I support both, and think the two reasons are magnifying each other.
 
Kiba said:
JIraiya make sense to me.

That's probably why I am the strongest advocate for taking JIraiya at face value.
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I think, for me, the biggest reason that Jiraiya doesnt make sense to me is the long term consequences of these actions. I know you've replied to some of my posts, but, to me, it feels like all of your statements have been really general rather than proving why it makes sense for Jiraiya, out of all options available, to be doing what he's doing.

I'd be very interested in hearing from you further on this subject, but that would just be for my own curiosity. So if you want to awesome, if not, no worries. I am glad that this is making sense to someone.
 
@Saint

My personal read on the situation:
I don't think that Jiraiya is actually acting out of anger and I don't think think that what he's doing is confusing. Rather, it's that his actions are more or less entirely opaque to us since it seems like he's acting based on knowledge that he has but that we have no non-canon way of guessing at.

Jiraiya also knows that we cannot in any sane way guess his second-level moves or play the political game (we don't know anything about Leaf politics), but, as much as we have one, Jiraiya is our chief patron in terms of political clout. Therefore it makes sense that we should act in the way he's driving us to act by responding with a first-level response to his actions.

We should definitely try to figure out the second-level game but there's not really enough information and even if there were, it would still probably make sense to respond the way Jiraiya intends, so I don't think it's relevant for our actions in this update.
 
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I think that J has shown that he does not necessarily have our best interests in hand, lesson learned or not. He can't be trusted to be anything but a source of XP or Skills or Quests (and the later is debatable) from now on. We need to be a lot more paronoid, and treat interacting with Konoha as dealing with an untrusted neutral party at best, and a potential hostile enemy at worst.

We should not trust this man to do anything or keep any of our actual secrets until we can at least give him a bloody nose if he doesn't. We quite literally can only trust these guys as far as we can throw them, smiles and niceties and all.
 
1234qwerty said:
Jiraiya is doing this to give us a taste of our own medicine. He's treating us with the same level of paranoia we asked him to treat Kabuto with, except Kabuto is a loyal leaf nin and we're random missing nin.

I have a rough draft of a plan I think is pretty good. Won't be able to post it soon, but if anybody likes it enough to edit it into proper plan format and get voting going before too close to the deadline, I would greatly appreciate it.

action plan sleeping on it . edit to fit what how why format.

-scan teammates' faces before answering
-partially out of curiosity, partially to see how there attitudes may have changed since our nap.

-tone. we are contrite. we made a mistake and hurt our teams opinions of us. we want to make amends. we are confident in our analysis of the situation. we will not grovel; we're interested in fixing our mistakes, not wallowing in them. we will not hesitate to grovel if jiraiya makes it clear that's what he wants from us. survival before pride.

-op sec. dont reveal anything info unnecessary to our answer. refer to secret info known only to us and jiraiya in a way that he can recognize, but a 3rd party couldnt. drop this if it annoys him. dynamic decision to reveal more based on how receptive jiraiya is being. dont make the same mistake again of ... and being too honest. if he just wants apology, just apologize. if he wants our analysis, give him it. if he cares for a thorough analysis, expound on that. dont resist quitting while we're ahead. if things are looking good, peak at Mari every now and then for cues to stop before going too far.

-core of apology: take full responsibility for our own error. disparity between loyal nin, the world we want to see, and the reality of being deniable assets. our lack of political experience. mitigating circumstances: our ratio of being a missing nin to normal nin. even as a normal nin, we were bad enough at navigating the political system for swamp to happen. no manual for how to be disposable assets. what is allowed and what is off limits? (3rd date, not dating for 6 months. 1 alarm seal is our current scale for going pretty damn far. not 100 explosion seals.) dont say the word explosion. copy top plan's current explanation.
-take responsibility for our actions. do not blame jiraiya. he's smart enough to see the error in his ways if he feels there is any without us taking the risk to explicitly point it out to him. unless he asks.
-attempt to absolve teammates if there's an opportunity. stop if this annoys jiraiya. do not throw our teammates under the bus in our apology. dont make statements/promises on our team's behalf. odds are low of jiraiya throwing away our value to him by just killing us. keiko is the pangolin summoner. edit plan to remove 'we's and replace them with 'hazou's.

-we are willing to be mindscanned if it's necessary, but we will not bring up concessions like that unecessarily. neither will we remind jiraiya of screw ups we've made while working for him unnecessarily. we will not flinch if he chooses to bring them up. we will be prepared to answer any questions he interrupts with, like did we intend to threaten jiraiya himself? did we intend threat to any leaf nin? etc.

-play by play of events. don't repeat info from our previous meeting as much as possible, except for framing. be ready to repeat it if he's in a more charitable mood and wants to hear it again after dismissing it the first time.
-we met kabuto. later, we noticed how effectively he maneuvered us. our infiltration specialist sensei confirmed this. we decided to wait and see, since akane's life was at stake, we weren't sure, and we didnt want to rock the boat with jiraiya or leaf. recently, we improved our relationship with jiraiya while sealing together. also, a few days in, we had a better idea of our standing in leaf. havent read the treaty jiraiya mentioned about bloodline secrets, but have a reason to suspect that some rules are in place. engaged with kabuto to passively gather more info, thinking active investigation was off limits.
-our mishap with asuma was a prelude to this. certainly, part of our outburst was because of a lack of opsec and professionalism. however, a larger part of it was because of us buying into leaf's hype and jiraiya being willing to help with uplift. when an enemy has your clan members as slaves, you dont shout it out loud in the middle of their territory. you take note of your suspicion and begin planning countermeasures. you only get angry like that when your allies betray you. it was our mistake for treating our relationship differently from what it actually is. maybe this is an opportunity to graduate, even knowing we'll have to keep being valuable disposable assets to gain the rest of leaf's favor. dropping pretenses leads to being more effective in the immediate future. however, learning how to be disposable assets is also important, especially given leaf is made up of disparate interests, not all of which wish us the best. in this, we're willing to conform to what jiraiya wants from us. we just ask for explicit terms(as explicit as they can get) about what constitutes going to far and what is expected of us. our failure to communicate our operation in hot springs is a clear indicator we dont know what we're doing. it's long past time to remedy this.
-we're decidedly bad at opsec, but asking ourselves what we would want a subordinate in our position to do, we would want them to report every concern they deem legitimate, except for extraordinary circumstances. the problem is if jiraiya thinks we're lying about having a legitimate concern or disagrees with the premise. we also have no way of confirming our beliefs about it's legitimacy except by revealing it to him. then he casually dismisses our concerns about a teammates safety. thinking about it, we're ready to trade some info about our bloodlines for getting akane access to better treatment, but that wasnt an apparent part of the deal. we're not okay with having her health put in jeopardy for not revealing bloodline info we didnt know we had to explicitly. jiraiya demands more evidence when we don't think we're in a situation to be able to gather any. doesnt sink in past the anger at being stonewalled by jiraiya. can ask for clarification now if appropriate.


-our uplift goals and how they effect our view of akane, jiraiya, leaf, the team, and ourselves. the net weight of our actions so far.
-things both we and jiraiya knew when sitting down for that meeting: jiraiya is stronger than all of us combined. we want his help in our uplift goals. we have uplift goals that involve eliminating tribalism from the EN.
-sobered up, we can say the following. precommitments to saving any member left behind or variations thereof improve the effectiveness of a team. rescuing everybody left behind is rarely optimal. those opposing forces meet somewhere in the middle. saving akane is not worth how much we've endangered the rest of the team. the team's utility to world is too high compared to just akane. akane's worth to the world is higher than average due to her exposure to uplift goals and her skills combined with her personality. based on what we know and common sense, jiraiya's worth to the world is much higher than our teams. not to mention leaf as a whole. the only situations we'd imagine jeopardizing that is if hostile actions towards ourselves made us think something we had thought to be true was actually false or the damage we'd do to secure our safety would be lower than the damage from our own deaths. the preceding statement can be omitted as part of quitting while we're ahead or at the very least softened by saying we couldn't imagine jeopardizing that except for very edge cases... we'll have to work on incorporating these ideals strongly enough that they actually register during hostile situations, since the anger/fight or flight response is so strong.
-jiraiya has to judge us by our actions and our words. we claim to believe in uplift and have been fairly risky in exposing our ideals to him. he's pretty sure we're not lying(except maybe to ourselves). our actions are pretty indistinguishable from your average missing nin. we've done a lot of damage during the last year, with very few positives to show for it, yet. doubling down risks diluting our cause, but it's something hazou has to do to keep his integrity. tribalism is the problem we seek to fix in the world. how can we expect to do that if we wont even fix it among ourselves? akane is important, and she's hazou's first love, but it's time to get rid of that cognitive dissonance.

-things we have in mind while we're answering but dont directly effect what we're saying
--maybe something similar happened to jiraiya via hiruzen when he was young
--this is jiraiya applying our standard of paranoia towards kabuto to ourselves
--jiraiya may be doing this due to a third party, not us. (low probability)
--these mostly shouldnt be considered unless changes midupdate drastically increase their probability. confirmation from inoue before accepting them would be ideal before acting on them if the situation isnt dire. vocal or body language
--we will take everything jiraiya says at face value except if there is a clear indication that he's kidding(inoue can indicate to us) we will not treat this as a test, but a genuine threat to our lives.
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I think if he asked us if we were making a threat, and did it by making it sound threatening he would be giving us the same medicine we had served him.
 
Saint said:
In the story he says this, so at this point, he is either saying he thinks we threatened kabuto + himself for real, or he is fucking with us.
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Why do you think he's kidding around?

You should try to see it from his point of view and not from ours. Forget everything we think we know and what we think, and think from the perspective of Jiraiya.
 
Kiba said:
Why do you think he's kidding around?

You should try to see it from his point of view and not from ours. Forget everything we think we know and what we think, and think from the perspective of Jiraiya.
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When I say, "fucking with us" i mean his intention isn't fully realized by what we are seeing on the surface. I, in no way, think this is the Jiraiya from the Manga, but look at his past actions! Look at everything he's done. Think about how valuable of assets we are. We make new sealing technology, we just, possibly, gave Leaf a huge, huge bonus to their survelliance techniques. And now, despite being smart enough and having the deception skill to understand that we couldn't and didn't mean to actually threaten Kabuto he is taking this action.

IT MAKES NO SENSE!

In a previous post I outline other things he could have done, that if he wanted to kill us or teach us a lesson, would probably work better. This question he just gave us. That's a "im fucking with you question". Jiraiya, or any powerful ninja, can just kill us. REALLY EASILY! Just do it. Maybe someone will be unhappy, but probably not, he's one of the fucking Sannin.

When I try to look at it from Jiraiya's perspective I come to two conclusions, that I feel are more likely to be true than other things.
1. He is a sick fuck who thinks that the proper way to teach etiquette lessons to teenagers is to lock them into killboxes (I, personally, disagree with this as a learning tool).
2. There are things going on that are so opaque and insane that they outweigh considerations like:
a Jonin deniable asset, bloodline deniable assets, seal master (we can maybe throw this out cause Kagome is more or less insane), someone who INVENTS NEW SEALS THAT ARE USEFUL, Akane's attachments, presumably all of the things that Kabuto was learning about us, the fact that up to this point CLAN KIDS were associating with us (which if they had any plans to kill us, well, that seems awfully weird), plus we seem to be maybe competent at doing jobs cause we got Arkida or whatever the fuck her name is, it also wouldn't surprise me if they knew about the potential Sharingan shit with Hazou, not to mention the weird summoner fuck up this could be cause of Keiko's summoning contract, and I think i'm missing shit (which is even more insane).
This makes me scared and freaked out because at this point I SEE NO WAY TO NOT FUCK UP : O

Which is why I am not voting for anything or putting together an action plan.
 
Question: Does Hazo has a personality independent of the hivemind?

Hypothetically speaking, do you think he will screw up if we let him do all the speaking and thinking?
 
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