That could work.
(I mean, it would be a hell of a project, but it's tons better than genocide.)
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- 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
That could work.
(I mean, it would be a hell of a project, but it's tons better than genocide.)
I don't really have a good sense for the scale of the Summon civilizations.
When we talk about "the pangolins" how many people are we talking about? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Millions? Because the answer changes how easy it is to sway them and their course of action.
When we talk about "the pangolins" how many people are we talking about? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Millions? Because the answer changes how easy it is to sway them and their course of action.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
Seconded. Although I'm unsure to what extent Jiraiya will see summons going all Hitler on the 7th Path a problem, hopefully he'll be horrified when he hears from Keiko how bad it's gotten.
That would just leave the very difficult question of how we could do anything about it.
I suppose as a last resort we could always switch to another summon clan and burn the Pangolin's scroll to forever deprive them of a summoner.
- Location
- Yes.
Heads up, Summoning scrolls are meant to be indestructable. I would have suggested space travel and launching it into the nearest black hole, but that would give the excuse to build nukes.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
Maybe we could toss it into a volcano or sink it deep into the ocean or something. Put it somewhere where nobody can get at it even if they somehow found out where it was.
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Who the fuck made these things?
Seriously, any single aspect of a summoning scroll would be a legendary achievement itself. Indestructible? Transporting objects and people between dimensions? Providing summons with chakra construct bodies?
Everything about them says they're the work of gods, not men. And yet... and yet... if we are to take Kagome's story remotely seriously, the only two gods he knows of don't do sealing.
- Location
- Europe
Panchiampa isn't really part of Pangolin military command, we should probably find more 'rebel' Pangolins and meet the secret Pangolin resistance or create it.
That's why I think either J is wrong about the scrolls being seals, or K is wrong about Hagoromo/Hamura not doing Sealing, or Indra and Ashura made the scrolls before Hagoromo erased them from history.
- Location
- Potato land
We actually have significant leverage over the Pangolins. Their recent military successes are, in large part, a result of our contribution. We also own the summoning scroll, giving us effectively exclusive access. We can deprive them of all this permanently by encasing said scroll in concrete and sinking it in the ocean. The only thing they can do to retaliate is kill Keiko, maybe attack the Toads.
According to Kagome, the Sage made the summon realm and the scrolls both. How that squares with the Sage not being a sealmaster, and Jiraiya's claim that scrolls are seals, I'm not sure.
According to Kagome, the Sage made the summon realm and the scrolls both. How that squares with the Sage not being a sealmaster, and Jiraiya's claim that scrolls are seals, I'm not sure.
- Location
- Yes.
TBF Jiraiya claimed that scrolls are "essentially very elaborate, very powerful seals", which could alternatively mean that they function in a similar way without being the same thing. Which still kinda doesn't gel with the Sage being a shit sealmaster...
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
This is not an official pronouncement and has no impact on MfD Canon, but the discussion of Jiraiya's information made me think of this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CA0vTHRU0AAGz84.jpg
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CA0vTHRU0AAGz84.jpg
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- Location
- US
Inb4 the pangolins really do keep finding all of this information that pushes them into conflict with other clans, but it was planted in conspiracy by the Capybaras and Mara clans to implicate their rivals.
Apparently the Hyena clan has always been a target. This was, however, around the time the Panglins were negotiating an armistice with them. Perhaps we can approach this as:
Taking out Hyenas, Leopards, and Condors makes a certain kind of sense considering long standing grievances. Taking out Condors was necessary? to regain access to the Library.
There might be chakra-magical concerns over the ownership of territory on the 7th path, as each summon is shown to grow strong via nature chakra - it is plausible that sources of natural chakra (generally more territory) is a direct social and military asset, beyond strict military/economic strategic routing/positioning/fortification concerns. Might have something to do with why the sky literally changes color depending on the owner of the territory underneath. Would like to know more about this, and how it plays into 7th path politics.
Apparently the Hyena clan has always been a target. This was, however, around the time the Panglins were negotiating an armistice with them. Perhaps we can approach this as:
- The Hyenas were in conspiracy with the Condors before the armistice (this is known, and provides an out for those who *found* the implicating information)
- The pangolins entered armistice with the Hyenas, at which point they stopped conspiring according to the terms
- Launching an attack without additional aggression would break faith in the armistice, which may be construed as against the will of the Sage
- It is therefore acceptable to build up the military (there's no way to reverse that tide now) but to hold off on actually launching an attack without provocation from the Hyenas.
- Maybe channel the build-up and religious righteous supremacy into being a universal deterrent against warring clans. Commit to entering conflict against any clans that are shown to initiate aggression.
Taking out Hyenas, Leopards, and Condors makes a certain kind of sense considering long standing grievances. Taking out Condors was necessary? to regain access to the Library.
There might be chakra-magical concerns over the ownership of territory on the 7th path, as each summon is shown to grow strong via nature chakra - it is plausible that sources of natural chakra (generally more territory) is a direct social and military asset, beyond strict military/economic strategic routing/positioning/fortification concerns. Might have something to do with why the sky literally changes color depending on the owner of the territory underneath. Would like to know more about this, and how it plays into 7th path politics.
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Well. Girl does have a point, so let's start now.
Renogotiate Keiko's contract to provide only 20 seals per month, just to keep Pangolin territory safe, in exchange for keeping Keiko's Tessera, start working on direct civilian uplift projects, etc.
Renogotiate Keiko's contract to provide only 20 seals per month, just to keep Pangolin territory safe, in exchange for keeping Keiko's Tessera, start working on direct civilian uplift projects, etc.
- Location
- Potato land
You know what the great thing about this update is, despite the defeatist and sombre tone? That Keiko actually considers the condor genocide evil, rather than business as usual. That she sees the sinking of the Sunset Racer as abhorrent, rather than a necessity for the sake of village security. In her own words, that she was forced to take stock of what her own impact on the world is, rather than just passively accept the status quo.
We've gained a powerful ally, in a way. And one who will henceforth call us out on our bullshit and keep us from straying from the path too much, hopefully.
We've gained a powerful ally, in a way. And one who will henceforth call us out on our bullshit and keep us from straying from the path too much, hopefully.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I am just taking the piss. There's an "/s" there for a reason.
Yes. These are complicated issues and not binary choices. We could have ignored Minami's orders to blow up the entire ship. There were valid reasons that this needed to be done though, and we did not come up with a valid third option that satisfied everyone. Would ignoring the orders have come back to bite us in the ass? Could have.
We could just throw the Pangolin scroll into the sea and never summon them again. We could also just stop being ninja. We could do any number of things. Should we? That becomes a vastly more complicated question. Saying "take a third option" is a convenient response that trivially removes any moral conundrum here, but it sort of relies on there being a third option, and that said third option is practically viable enough to solve the problem at hand. These are not guaranteed to exist. Also...
Modelling this as a debt calculation is a vast oversimplification. There is no amount of building walls, no amount of free medical treatment, no amount of social equality that will bring those passengers back to life. (Bringing them back to life would work, in a practical sense I suppose.)
That decision has been bought and paid for already. There is no amount of black in our moral ledger that's going to balance out those hundred or so civilian names that we have scrawled in the debit column with their own blood. Sometimes, you have to make hard decisions. Often times, there is no objectively "good" option, merely what is good or bad at the moment (or potentially good or bad in the future). You can never really know, can you?
I agree that we should begin doing good things, I disagree that we should view this as making up (
) for past moral transgressions. This is both an unhealthy mindset and a poor analogy. We should do good things because its the right thing to do.Thats hardly our fault IC.
It has been like, two months in universe since shit has started hitting the fan. Do you seriously expect us to put that on hold and start helping old ladies cross the street? Are you sure you aren't letting the passage of time IRL influence your perception here?
Yes!
No! At least, not in any large and permanent capacity.
As XP totals tend to infinity, Future Team Uplift is the single best chance to raise this crapsack hellhole out of its current stagnant shitpile state, permanently. A pile of S-rank nin guided by the full cognitive might of the Hivemind and equipped with our (arguably superior) moral codex is as close as "Reincarnate the Sage and have him fix literally everything." as this planet is ever going to get, barring a miracle that shatters all reasonable suspension of disbelief.
Sacrificing short term optimal outcomes is fine, as long as this doesn't send you on a crash course to The Worst Timeline. As I see it, once Jiraiya has a hold on the hat, and we have rescued Naruto, we will at least have averted the apocalypse to the point where its mostly out of our hands for the next few years.
Suppose we got (3) extra summoning scrolls. Hell, suppose we get one, and this (these) summon clan(s) are extremely reasonable. One could make an argument for trading out the Pangolin scroll in favor of the new one. This starts us back at square one as far as relations go, but its obviously worth depowering the Pangolins until we are in a position to actually deal with the shitty Empire Building thing they got going on. But we still actually need to fix this, because the Pangolins likely have enough resources without our help by now to start doing this the slow way, even if we don't provide seals any more.
Sure, but theres no need to do this because we are playing the hero or reclaiming our mantle of "being the good guys" or something. We should work on these things because we want to see the world be a better place.
Thats a good point. We should try to leverage this perspective to Pantsaa. Maybe we can point out that this will harm Jiraiya (and both the Toads and Pangolins) as well. Its a short leap from "Ah take out the Pangolin Summoner with our alliance of Summoners" to "We should band together and convince our summons to unite and annihilate the Pangolins.". I see no reason why this isn't a valid response from the summoning clans at large to the Pangolin expansion, especially if summoners are the ones putting gears into motion.
Errrrrr....We shouldn't blatantly threaten the people that may or may not be able to teleport our sister into their dimension, and have shown an enormous amount of moral elasticity in justifying murdering the shit out of things purely for their own gain. All us cutting ties with them does at the moment is remove any future responsibility or associated guilt we may have, and does not actually fix the main problem or their behavior in any way. Its short term mitigation with long term cost.
Not enough info to explicitly start negotiating IMO.
This is very explicitly a thing Jiraiya would have to help us out with. At the very least, he might need some time to figure out where to get alternative income sources.
Also: Pangolins might be more amicable to "Stop killing everyone" negotiations, if we present them with the chilled corpse of the Condor summoner, as well as the summoning scroll. Just a point.
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- Location
- Yes.
The trick is to make them all detonate on each other mid-air. Can't touch the ground if they're all blown up!
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
So solve the pangolin problem by throwing them at Akatsuki?The trick is to make them all detonate on each other mid-air. Can't touch the ground if they're all blown up!
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Ohgodno
The religious Zealots find out Nagato has the Rinnegan and all its sage related abilities. He can summon the Pantakrators personal mounts.
Who do you think they side with?
Ok, so while I don't think we need to immediately respond to Keiko (she does need time to process) I think we will want to continue this conversation.
Some things we should note:
1. The world is a crapsack world. This is fact. We're working to improve it, but that's going to be a long, drawn out process. It's also going to require a degree of pragmatism and compromise - that's why we decided to go with Leaf rather than our pie in the sky dreams of doing it as missing-nin. Our priorities are A) prevent the collapse of civilization and B) improve civilization so that more people live long, happy, and prosperous lives. In that order. Without A, B can't occur. It sucks, but it's the reality we're dealing with.
2. We have accomplished some of our objectives. For instance, we went to Leaf with skywalkers in part to prevent a long, drawn out war between Leaf and Mist, under the premise that skywalkers would allow Leaf to dominate early on and end the war with minimal deaths. This was accomplished. The war never even got officially declared. There was a single battle and about a dozen ninja on both sides died, and it would have been less had it not been for the unexpected interference of Akatsuki. The end result is actually beyond the wildest dreams of what we thought would occur - the psychotic despot Yagura is no longer in power and has been replaced with largely reasonable diplomat Ren, and Leaf and Mist will almost certainly be forming an alliance. That helps further the objective of "make Leaf win" so that we can prevent future wars. We've also helped ensure that Jiraiya, a progressive whose agenda is close to what we want, will likely keep the hat, putting us in a position to influence future policy in a way that is positive.
As far as cultural genocide in Mist goes, us having an alliance rather than a military occupation is likely to see this be only a partial cultural change rather than a total one. And make no mistake, Mist's culture needs to change. The culture as it was under Yagura is one of fear, one where neighbors were expected to report their neighbors' activities to secret police, one where an errant comment could end up having you taken to T&I for questioning and reeducation, one in which civilians live in terror of the notion of offending the ninjas that are supposed to be their protectors, one in which a large group of ninja could be tricked into abandoning their homes, families, and friends because they've been told their leader has decided to send them on a suicide mission because they are politically inconvenient for him. Mist's culture as it is needs change badly. Change is not always comfortable, but it can be necessary.
3. In light of the above, we probably prevented a large number of civilian deaths. Even with the horrible thing that happened with the boat as a result of Akatsuki kidnapping Naruto weighed in, the total number of lives saved as a result of our choices is probably still much higher. How many civilians would have likely died had we simply allowed Leaf and Mist to go to war without Leaf having skywalkers? Hundreds? Thousands? This doesn't mean that the lives we took don't have karmic weight or should be dismissed, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint our choices have likely saved more lives than we've ended up taking.
4. Keiko needs to realize that her actions with regards to the Pangolins have more weight than she thinks. They have raised her up as a national hero, as a celebrity, as a role model for young Pangolins to look up to. And when the Pangolin government paraded a group of helpless prisoners in front of her and offered her the chance to execute them, she declined. Publicly. When given a moral choice where doing the wrong thing would personally benefit her and her family, she instead decided to do the right thing. Numerous Pangolins will notice that.
If she doesn't like the direction which Pangolin society is going in, then she should use the influence she has to change that. And while the Pangolins might gripe about it, there's only so much they can do, because quite frankly they need us more than we need them. Sure, they've been exceedingly useful, but at the end of the day if we cancelled her contract and put their scroll in a basement to gather dust there's not jack shit they could do about it. That means no more Pankrator's Eyes for them, which means they'll lack the weapon they need to keep their advantage against their foes, which means the collapse of their empire and possible genocide of their people by angry enemies - the Pangolins, in their arrogance, have perhaps not realized just how dependent they are on us now. And if they tried to forcibly reverse summon her and kill her for that, then Jiraiya will influence the Toads to end their long standing alliance over it, costing them their only current ally.
Some things we should note:
1. The world is a crapsack world. This is fact. We're working to improve it, but that's going to be a long, drawn out process. It's also going to require a degree of pragmatism and compromise - that's why we decided to go with Leaf rather than our pie in the sky dreams of doing it as missing-nin. Our priorities are A) prevent the collapse of civilization and B) improve civilization so that more people live long, happy, and prosperous lives. In that order. Without A, B can't occur. It sucks, but it's the reality we're dealing with.
2. We have accomplished some of our objectives. For instance, we went to Leaf with skywalkers in part to prevent a long, drawn out war between Leaf and Mist, under the premise that skywalkers would allow Leaf to dominate early on and end the war with minimal deaths. This was accomplished. The war never even got officially declared. There was a single battle and about a dozen ninja on both sides died, and it would have been less had it not been for the unexpected interference of Akatsuki. The end result is actually beyond the wildest dreams of what we thought would occur - the psychotic despot Yagura is no longer in power and has been replaced with largely reasonable diplomat Ren, and Leaf and Mist will almost certainly be forming an alliance. That helps further the objective of "make Leaf win" so that we can prevent future wars. We've also helped ensure that Jiraiya, a progressive whose agenda is close to what we want, will likely keep the hat, putting us in a position to influence future policy in a way that is positive.
As far as cultural genocide in Mist goes, us having an alliance rather than a military occupation is likely to see this be only a partial cultural change rather than a total one. And make no mistake, Mist's culture needs to change. The culture as it was under Yagura is one of fear, one where neighbors were expected to report their neighbors' activities to secret police, one where an errant comment could end up having you taken to T&I for questioning and reeducation, one in which civilians live in terror of the notion of offending the ninjas that are supposed to be their protectors, one in which a large group of ninja could be tricked into abandoning their homes, families, and friends because they've been told their leader has decided to send them on a suicide mission because they are politically inconvenient for him. Mist's culture as it is needs change badly. Change is not always comfortable, but it can be necessary.
3. In light of the above, we probably prevented a large number of civilian deaths. Even with the horrible thing that happened with the boat as a result of Akatsuki kidnapping Naruto weighed in, the total number of lives saved as a result of our choices is probably still much higher. How many civilians would have likely died had we simply allowed Leaf and Mist to go to war without Leaf having skywalkers? Hundreds? Thousands? This doesn't mean that the lives we took don't have karmic weight or should be dismissed, but from a purely utilitarian standpoint our choices have likely saved more lives than we've ended up taking.
4. Keiko needs to realize that her actions with regards to the Pangolins have more weight than she thinks. They have raised her up as a national hero, as a celebrity, as a role model for young Pangolins to look up to. And when the Pangolin government paraded a group of helpless prisoners in front of her and offered her the chance to execute them, she declined. Publicly. When given a moral choice where doing the wrong thing would personally benefit her and her family, she instead decided to do the right thing. Numerous Pangolins will notice that.
If she doesn't like the direction which Pangolin society is going in, then she should use the influence she has to change that. And while the Pangolins might gripe about it, there's only so much they can do, because quite frankly they need us more than we need them. Sure, they've been exceedingly useful, but at the end of the day if we cancelled her contract and put their scroll in a basement to gather dust there's not jack shit they could do about it. That means no more Pankrator's Eyes for them, which means they'll lack the weapon they need to keep their advantage against their foes, which means the collapse of their empire and possible genocide of their people by angry enemies - the Pangolins, in their arrogance, have perhaps not realized just how dependent they are on us now. And if they tried to forcibly reverse summon her and kill her for that, then Jiraiya will influence the Toads to end their long standing alliance over it, costing them their only current ally.
- Location
- Yes.
nonononnonoono this is the wrong order!
We do not throw the Pangolins at Akatsuki, we throw Akatsuki at the Pangolins!
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Funnies aside...
This is effectively just us throwing the problem aside (creating a potentially larger problem even) and then absolving ourselves of any responsibilty.
Perhaps we could trade the Pangolin Scroll to Orochimaru or someone in exchange for theirs. If Snek Uncle is as utilitarian as the thread believes, he will see the potential value in being able to keep the summon realm un-Pangolinized.
Still: Christ this is a problem for us. What if they piss off some S rank summoner that just murders our ass im retaliation while we're out on a mission or something?
Ugh...