Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I will just link to this post right here then I guess?
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
Shadow clones are traumatizing, and not really suitable warfare, unless you're Naruto.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I'm not gonna vote for providing Jiraiya the outlines of nukes whch he will not use (because Naruto) while in Mist. No degree of operational security outside of Leaf is sufficient for that kind of discussion, and he also explicitly told him to strike such thoughts from Hazou's mind.
Right, thank you all for the context and perspectives.
Just one more thing if nobody minds, is there any serious consideration of the possibility of isolated Uplifted societies? The crab bucket, power balance, politics of the known Ninja Villages caused them to put down known upstarts like the Uzumaki and Samurai but apparently faceless threats that 'just' kill everyone who crosses the border like Rain or Bear don't provoke a coalition against them.
How much densely settled land would you need to out populate the EN? How many generations without warfare to cull the numbers would it take to exceed the chakra-wielding population from a small seed pop?
It kind of seems like the way to 'win' in MfD and get out of the downward spiral. Some of Kagome's village under the sea ideas kind of make sense from that perspective.
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Well, to be fair, Kagome is speaking as a Whirlpool child refugee raised under justifiably ultra-paranoid isolationism in Waterfall.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
The point is moot actually. I don't think Jiraiya researched these, and we're short ~140 Implosion Seals before we get it to MOAB tier without much more sophisticated timing and testing, so I'll remove that.
- Location
- USA
I feel like the Sealsmith of the Gods plan is misreading the situation.
Like, we have comparatively a lot of seals, because there are 3 sealsmiths among less than ten members. This lets us expend them a lot for a clan. But, like, the idea that we have more than villages just seems wrong. They have dozens of sealsmiths each, right? It is a basic ninpo deal, not a bloodline limit, yeah?
Nobody else decided to use them to win a sporting event, sure, but this is war. They won't be stingy here. They are going to deploy any and all good weapons that they have.
If nothing else, Hidden Rain is in on this, right? They have had the Iron Nerve for the entirety of their history, and until recently the Fourth Mizkage was running things, so presumably they have literal scrooge mcduck mountains of seals.
Also, like, aren't half of the seals we'd be 'giving' Jiraiya advice on deploying the ones that he gave to us in the first place? I swear the Banshee Slayers/Earbusters were a reward from him. It seems like he is probably using them already if they are going to be useful in an S-rank fight.
I dunno, the whole thing feels like it is just going to get our forehead flicked, and a fond/tolerant chuckle. We've known a summoner for half a year, Jiraiya is the greatest living one, and we telling him that maybe he should keep in mind that they can help him to escape?
I don't think we don't need to chunin-splain how to ninja fight to the Hokage. Everyone going along on this expedition is better at it than us. I feel like we should focus on what we are going to do back in Hidden Leaf, or if we decide to go to Hidden Mountain.
Like, we have comparatively a lot of seals, because there are 3 sealsmiths among less than ten members. This lets us expend them a lot for a clan. But, like, the idea that we have more than villages just seems wrong. They have dozens of sealsmiths each, right? It is a basic ninpo deal, not a bloodline limit, yeah?
Nobody else decided to use them to win a sporting event, sure, but this is war. They won't be stingy here. They are going to deploy any and all good weapons that they have.
If nothing else, Hidden Rain is in on this, right? They have had the Iron Nerve for the entirety of their history, and until recently the Fourth Mizkage was running things, so presumably they have literal scrooge mcduck mountains of seals.
Also, like, aren't half of the seals we'd be 'giving' Jiraiya advice on deploying the ones that he gave to us in the first place? I swear the Banshee Slayers/Earbusters were a reward from him. It seems like he is probably using them already if they are going to be useful in an S-rank fight.
I dunno, the whole thing feels like it is just going to get our forehead flicked, and a fond/tolerant chuckle. We've known a summoner for half a year, Jiraiya is the greatest living one, and we telling him that maybe he should keep in mind that they can help him to escape?
I don't think we don't need to chunin-splain how to ninja fight to the Hokage. Everyone going along on this expedition is better at it than us. I feel like we should focus on what we are going to do back in Hidden Leaf, or if we decide to go to Hidden Mountain.
- Location
- NY
And yet every sealmaster on this expedition didn't think of Skywalkers, while we did.
In the general case, their skill level at all things ninja is clearly, obviously, and massively greater than ours. That doesn't prevent them from missing single insights which we may have not missed. So long as we remember our role here as the out-of-the-box dirty tricks department, I don't think it'll be a problem.
We don't what's obvious and not obvious to Jiraiya. Better to let Jiraiya humors us.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
The Elemental Nations, if memory serves, are about a fourth the size of Australia (not sure why we used that comparison, but I remember it) in landmass, and we know Fire Country has about 300,000 people in it.
If we estimate about 2,000,000 people in the Elemental Nations total (highball probably, but I'm being generous), then they have a population density of... 1 person per square kilometer, roughly (Australia is 7.7 million km2, a quarter of it would be just shy of 2 million km2).
It's estimated here on Wikipedia that 12th century Japan had a total population of about 7-10 million people. Japan is about 375,000 km2 by landmass, so that gives us a population density of 19-27 people per square kilometer. I use these numbers because I want to estimate what kind of population density you can achieve in real-world conditions at that tech level, even if it leaves rather wide error bars.
So if you want to match the EN population of 2,000,000 people in a secluded landmass with a population density akin to the IRL equivalent of the Elemental Nations tech-wise, you'd need about 100,000 km2. To get that, we'd need a 300km by 300 km landmass (or a landmass with 180km radius, whichever approximates better).
By my estimates on the canonical map of the EN, none of the smaller islands reach anywhere near that size. You'd need something like half of the Eastern Continent to house that many people, and you don't stay out of the ninja politics game when you're that size, unless you're really far away (or otherwise inhospitable like Snow, but if you live in Snow you're not hitting feudal Japan pop density in the first place).
The problem is further compounded by having to fend off chakra beasts across your entire country, which is no easy feat when we're talking scales in the hundreds of kilometers.
Let's suppose you make miraculous feats of chakra-engineering and get your hideaway up to modern Japan pop density (>850 people per square kilometer). Now we're looking at 2,350 km2, measured as a square ~50km to a side or as a circle ~27km in radius. Something that small could be set up on one or two of the smaller islands on the south end of the map, but remember that we're talking about modern population density, aka after multiple agricultural revolutions and the industrial revolution and the birth of modern civilization and modern healthcare, which even with chakra-engineering sounds pretty farfetched to me.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
*makes a vague turning-a-bowl-upside-down motion with hands*
NPC's do miss classes of solutions that are fairly obvious to us.
On seals, consider: We have between the three of us approximately ~2000 seals. (Incidentally @OliWhail is the Seal inventory for Hazou correct? I think he should have an inventory more or less the same as Keiko/Noburi's , right? He expended a handful in the pre-match taunting, but I think he explicitly spent an entire evening staying up late [Ch 249] refilling their loadouts a few chapters ago).A decent portion of those are explosives, but a large portion of that are more esoteric seals that many folks either wont have access to-- period --or will not have the ability to print out en masse on such a short time frame.
Also, the Kurosawa explicitly don't leverage the Iron Nerve to print seals en masse, because they're idiots.
On chunin-splaining : I am willing to take the risk of being called an idiot by the J man for belching out strategic advice. In-universe, you are completely correct, there is probably an entire council of strategists that will be coming together to figure this out, and they have decades of experience doing this. OOC: all of that work is being done by 3 eternally overworked individuals, so I have no qualms proposing things to make their jobs easier.
- Location
- NY
*tries and fails to envision what said motion actually entails and why specifically a bowl*
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
Skywalkers are Air Domes turned upside down.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Skywalkers are Air Domes turned upside down.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
Maybe add the following line somewhere:
- Most of the ideas below are something Jiraiya likely already thought of, but you mention them on the off-chance he didn't.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
If Jiraiya and co. IC can be expected to Think Of Everything but our three overworked QMs can't, why can't we just prepare a list of Thought Of Everything to OOC present to them? Plans aren't our only method of communication with them, and all else being equal I'd rather not make Hazou look like an idiot in the process of us helping the QMs brainstorm what the Omnikage Alliance strategic plans are gonna be.
edit: to be more specific, if the intention for putting a line in the plan is "So the QMs will notice it and retroactively have had the Strategic HQ think of it" instead of "Because Hazou thinks the Strategic HQ might not have thought of it", we can just tell the QMs we think Strategic HQ might have thought of this and spare Hazou the look-like-an-idiot.
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- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
The "you" here sounds like you mean that Jiraiya should stay in Mist.
I agree that it seems weird that we are telling a bunch of Kage how to fight.
Among other things, it hurts immersion. At least for me. I am all for helping the QMs at modelling superpowered veteran killing machine geniuses, what with the QMs themselves not actually being such things. But having the Kage win or die based on things a genin said that, frankly, should have been mostly obvious to them and only isn't because none of our three QMs has the life experience of an S-rank shinobi becomes a bit silly. Not to mention that all the intel we actually have about Akatsuki either comes from Kagome's dubious ramblings or from one of Jiraiya's sources.
So we write various ideas into one comment, tag the QMs, and for good measure put a link inside the plan's comment but outside the plan proper. Having Hazou act silly in order to communicate with the weirdly ignorant (from an in-world viewpoint) spirits that supernaturally control Jiraiya is not necessary.
Great. Now can we jettison the vast majority of content about strategies and tactics and have Hazõ do something else, except maybe the summoning tricks which wasn't possible until Jiraiya have access to Wakahasia.
How about talk to his mother and say one last goodbye? Talks to folk about what the succession plans are, and who's acting hokage?
How about talk to his mother and say one last goodbye? Talks to folk about what the succession plans are, and who's acting hokage?
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I think we would want to meet with J anyway to be like "Here are all of our seals, by the way don't die
" anyway?Besides, as Noumero points out (and I have added) a bullet point to the effect of "Hey, you probably already thought of this stuff, but just in case...." should serve to differentiate.
Regardless--
--Ok, I removed the tactics part which seems to be so controversial. This seems sufficient FMPOV to be more general strategic spitballing than anything.
I can has votes now?
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
- Location
- Under a Rock
Wakahisa assisted chakra delivery could be done from Leaf. It won't be as fast, but I think we will have access to more chakra total.
And it will still be really, really fast. Enough to make the optimal strategy for Jiraiya to summon endless hoards of Toads who lemming rush the akatsuki while Jiraiya pops in and out of existence half a mile away.
Although... could we use the exam itself? Just keep all the chuunin/gennin in Mist and act as a battery, in addition to Mist's regular ninja?
That would tip our hand, but our hand might have already tipped.
And it will still be really, really fast. Enough to make the optimal strategy for Jiraiya to summon endless hoards of Toads who lemming rush the akatsuki while Jiraiya pops in and out of existence half a mile away.
Although... could we use the exam itself? Just keep all the chuunin/gennin in Mist and act as a battery, in addition to Mist's regular ninja?
That would tip our hand, but our hand might have already tipped.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
For what it's worth, @MMKII, I agree that the Tactics section especially seems excessive. It's definitely something in-universe people would think of, and they would do a better job because they, unlike us, would actually know what resources they will have. We don't even know how many people will be going, or what their capabilities are, beyond most general desc—
Hey! Put informing Jiraiya about Kagome's ramblings back in!
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They