- Location
- Yes.
So...do scorch squads actually exist? We never got a clear answer, and I'm starting to wonder if they were grue'd.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard open voting
- Location
- UK
It's easy to explain away a single quote, and I don't want to exhaustively document this trend to settle the matter for sure, but, again, this isn't the argument I'm trying to have. Surely you at least agree this is not a qualitative improvement?
Grued? Or Kagome's wrong. He can be both.
After all, Kagome can make reasonable leaps of logic that isn't necessary true.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Do you think that Keiko from the beginning of the quest would have been willing to open up to Tenten?
- Location
- UK
Yes, provided she was in the same environment.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
What does that actually mean?
"Environment" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. If it means "If Keiko was in a safe/secure village environment, yes", then I would be willing to bet money against that. A large part of why she's willing to open up to Tenten is past experiences building up to the point where she got tired of not being willing to open up. Without those experiences, she would not have taken the chance.
- Location
- UK
Oh, and one litmus test for whether an argument you're making is solid is to reverse the question and check whether your reasoning would break. If Ch.2 was in a safe environment, and Ch.219 was in an unfamiliar scenario in the middle of a disaster, would you have reasoned differently?
Article: Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
On the note of speculation as to whether things have been grued...
I'm pretty sure the QMs really don't want to deal with retconning. While it's possible... I dunno, it doesn't seem likely on a plot point as big as that. Something like gliders -- sure, whatever, we didn't do anything with that.
On a personal note, I think that worrying about whether things have been grued is actively bad for the quest, as far as story/writing/consistency goes. The Henge incident, to put it bluntly, is (or at least, should be, imo) a one-off thing that is never replicated else players might lose faith in the meta-layer of the story that they engage with.
I'm pretty sure the QMs really don't want to deal with retconning. While it's possible... I dunno, it doesn't seem likely on a plot point as big as that. Something like gliders -- sure, whatever, we didn't do anything with that.
On a personal note, I think that worrying about whether things have been grued is actively bad for the quest, as far as story/writing/consistency goes. The Henge incident, to put it bluntly, is (or at least, should be, imo) a one-off thing that is never replicated else players might lose faith in the meta-layer of the story that they engage with.
- Location
- UK
What specifically in the story made you think that?
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Because of the reasoning we got from her PoV.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
...Incidentally, I just realized there's another source for mom advice that we might be able to tap into later:
Minami Karen.
(someone liked a post 1600 pages back and now it's all coming back to me)
Is it a little awkward? Maybe.
Frankly, though, she's the adult we've opened up to most after Mari, Hana, and Neira, in that order. She's also raised Minami Nikko, which in and of itself is an endorsement, and she can also probably give us some perspective on Hana's issues, considering Minami's final days; helping Hana resolve her issues helps her come around to fixing Mari.
Moral of the story:
We should keep going out to teatime with different girls to solve our problems one by one
Minami Karen.
(someone liked a post 1600 pages back and now it's all coming back to me)
Is it a little awkward? Maybe.
Frankly, though, she's the adult we've opened up to most after Mari, Hana, and Neira, in that order. She's also raised Minami Nikko, which in and of itself is an endorsement, and she can also probably give us some perspective on Hana's issues, considering Minami's final days; helping Hana resolve her issues helps her come around to fixing Mari.
Moral of the story:
We should keep going out to teatime with different girls to solve our problems one by one
- Location
- UK
I'm not recalling what you're referring to. Do you recall roughly where in the story this was?
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
And provided she was the same Keiko?
There are a multitude of different interacting variables here. I don't think its quite simple as "This is qualitatively better/worse than before" unless you artificially strip away some nuances there.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
It's been the more recent chapters, and those before we went to the chuunin exams but after the Minami incident.
e:
Man, it's getting to the point where I kind of think we'd do well to go through every chapter and tag them individually with things like [Keiko Perspective], [Sealing Talk with Kagome], [Mist Infodump], etc.
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Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
When I inevitably do my post Christmas reread I will endeavor to do some of that.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A word of commentary: there is such a thing as Early Installment Weirdness, and insofar as you have no way of telling where it applies and where you are truly seeing hints and foreshadowing, I would be careful in drawing too many conclusions from the minor details of the early chapters.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Yeah, I was looking at one of the earlier chapters recently and heard about stuff like gliders in Sand and a technique that lets you turn into someone else. Crazy, huh?
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
A brief summary isn't really what I'm wanting, though, but rather a way to easily search out specific things on a per-chapter basis.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Yes, of course.
Mhmmm.
Hey all, if you want the last dozen or so action plans in one Cntrl-F-able document, look no further!
Plan compendium
Some dashing gentleman from flavor town has put together ...this! I have it on good authority they will put some more action plans from the past in as well, in addition to maintaining that doc semi-semi-regularly.
(Fucking magnets, how do they work!?)
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Thanks for this btw! it's a good resource for if we need to know if we've done something like training blindfighting (we have).
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I can answer that! Not only can I, I will.
In seriousness, I don't want the playerbase going down the paranoid road of not trusting reality and wasting a lot of effort on non-productive debate about whether something changed, so let me settle this right now.
First, a couple definitions:
By "retconned", I mean that some or all of a chapter was retroactively eliminated and is considered no longer to be part of the history of the MfD universe. Something that was retconned never happened. Retcons happen when the QMs make a mistake; usually that's a failure of simulationism (Youthsuit, Minami [EDIT: Kagome killing her]), but sometimes it's a failure of memory or consistency (Keiko mentioning a date, tipserators not blocking line of sight).
By "grued", I mean that something was excised from reality by deliberate choice of the QMs without any mistake requiring it. Things that are grued *were* part of reality, no longer are, and all memory of them and all (most?) evidence of their previous existence is gone.
By "faked", I mean that something presented on the page does not conform to in-universe reality. This is usually an "untrustworthy narrator" situation. For example, there were one or two small details of Jiraiya's past with the other Sannin that didn't happen exactly the way he described them. (That's OOC information, but what the heck.)
We're nearly three years and a million words into this story, and there are:
...very few retcons. Youthsuit, Minami, tipserators, second event attack + Cthulhu nightlights, and a few minor lines of dialogue that you probably wouldn't notice on a re-read. I think that's all. (Did I forget any, Loremaster?)
...a lot of fakes.
...exactly one grue: henge.
We use fakes a fair amount, where it makes sense. We avoid retcons like the plague; there will probably be another one at some point because the QMs are human and fallible, but so far we've managed to keep it to roughly one significant instance per year.
We do not currently have any plans to use the grue again. I won't promise it won't happen -- honestly, I find the idea of [EDIT: repeatedly and deliberately using it solely to play with the mechanic of a] breakdown in causality where only Kagome remembers the old versions to be pretty interesting. @Velorien is strongly against it, and I recognize the problems that it would cause, so I'm not pushing for it. It's pretty safe to assume it won't happen again.
Back to the original topic:
I hereby definitively state, with no weasel words or truth twisting, that the scorch squads have not been grued or retconned.
Now, they're horrible but, on the other hand, they got your whole team to unite behind the idea of Uplift, and you wouldn't be in Leaf without that. After three long years I am FINALLY getting to write the "building a village" quest that I wanted back in the beginning. So, in that very limited and "desperately looking for a silver lining" way... Yay, scorch squads!
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I note, of course, the conspicuous absence of any word on whether or not they were faked. Still, at least the idea of scorch squads has had positive results.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
As far as the finding a breakdown in causality interesting goes, by the way @eaglejarl, I would recommend time travel rather than grueing. Develop an internally-consistent method by which it functions (You've previously used the Time Loop version as regards retroactive sealing failures, but that's not necessary required for non-sealing failures), and it'd be fine. Though, granted, insofar as player suspension-of-disbelief goes with regard to time travel, use of it may require exposition as to its mechanics in-story in the medium-term.
(As may be obvious, I am personally fond of time travel
)
(As may be obvious, I am personally fond of time travel
)