- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That Snake was personable, seemed honest, and clearly enjoyed her time with you. I'm not sure what else to add -- were there specific questions?
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
- Location
- USA
Storing living creatures being dangerous in and of itself is not really a concern, I don't think. We've been given many indications in the past that the reason not to store living things is because it'll kill them (and/or that ninja can consciously resist, I think?), not any more esoteric reason.
That said: Oops, too late. Even putting aside smaller creatures (skin mites, etc.), Uplift alone has certainly incidentally stored hundred if not thousands of insects, parasites, etc. when storing wood or cloth or massacred chakra beasts. Also everyone else has also done this since the invention of the storage seal, with no indications of harm.
So it's almost certainly not dangerous to anything but the bed bugs if we start storing bed bugs to kill them.
--
I think @Sentient Tree is legitimately onto something, beyond just a small income stream from semi-defrauding innocent civilians (sorry Tree, I calls 'em how I sees 'em
). Using storage seals as perfect pesticide is a legitimately niche idea that the Goketsu are uniquely suited to recognize and implement at scale, meaning we can likely get past the "why hasn't anyone else done this brilliant thing?" check.Add that to our extra-planar knowledge about insects as disease vectors, food-borne parasites as a thing, etc., and you've got a recipe for quite a bit of good things we could be doing.
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Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
No, that's sufficient.
By the way, what colour are Mari's eyes currently? I should probably commit to asking this question after every update...
- Location
- USA
I might be overreacting to certain cues, but as soon as we got to this part the switch flipped in my head, moving Mari from "ally" to "threat".
That level of passive aggression, from someone who supposedly knows better? Either she suddenly doesn't know better (unlikely) or she now regards it as more useful to denigrate our position than to change our mind. First instinct is that she's decided to reduce Hazou's influence within the clan.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I mean, I agree with her, so...
e: I also agree with reducing Hazou's influence within the clan if we're going to characterize him as moralizing over stuff like this.
- Location
- NY
Yeah, +1. Remember, kung-fu wizard death world, ugly brutish and short, etc. That doesn't mean we turn it into a race to the bottom. That does mean we aim to be the least bad guy if it'll get us further.
- Location
- Academy City
- Pronouns
- They
I mean, the moralization comes from us. It seems backwards to blame him for that, rather than attribute it accurately. You might (perhaps correctly!) think that addressing it with he thread wouldn't be useful, but that doesn't mean dealing with it at the Hazou level will be.
- Location
- The state of Paranoia
Hmmm. We do need to figure out germ theory at some point.
Right now, ninja believe in some kind of spirits that cause illness and stuff. Could Hazō wonder if sealing spoiled stuff kills the spirits?
Or maybe Hazō could notice that cooking things makes them not go bad as fast, and that cooking living things kills them, then wonder if maybe there's something living inside food that makes it spoil?
Not sure if any of these ideas are sufficiently non-meta, but I gave it a shot.
- Location
- NY
I think you guys are talking about different things here, but regardless, Wide Eyed Idealism is never a good trait for someone with power over and responsibility for people - which we are, make no mistake.
- Location
- Why would this be required?
Yeah that's about what I expected with the whole dual-clanship thing, even if raising more Uchiha ninja wasn't the whole reason they even want this deal. Still things seem to have gone smoothly and we now have the Hagromo on our side. I am hesitantly optimistic for the future.
Also the dinner was nice and Honoka continues to be utterly adorable.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
It's not about blaming him for it. It's about how us making him do that characterized him as someone who will do that.
e: It therefore follows that if I want my will enacted, it's best left to someone other than Hazou, because Hazou is, in the future, going to tend against reasoned decisions.
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- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I find that you object to characterizations that make Hazō more moral very shocking. I 100% support Hazō in this chapter and Mari can deal with the fact she negotiated an initially unworkable deal
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Keep in mind that we might have decided to go full fantasy, just to mess with you. Maybe germs aren't a thing and there really are disease spirits! Mwhahahaha!
No change from last time.
Note: There was some confusion in Discord and, I think, also here: Hazō being adamant that the women be allowed to opt out and rejoin the Uchiha if they so chose was in the plan, not something I put in his head.
The relevant line:
Incidentally, the 'Current action slot allocations' post has been updated. It's linked in the 'Informational' threadmarks for easy reference.
The upcoming vote (the one ending on real-life July 10) should relate to what you want to do with your meetings on in-game Jan 9. This is a change from what I originally wrote at the bottom of the update, because I realized that there was currently no statement of what those meetings were supposed to accomplish and @Velorien would need that info.
Insert standard disclaimer about how I haven't done all the calendar counting yet, so it's possible that 'today' in-story is a day or so before/after I think it is. Even if that's the case, the schedule is still correct in relation.
- Location
- Liverpool
Excellent chapter @eaglejarl . Love the Kagome interactions, and appreciated the Uchiha deal conversation.
Anyone else worried by the repeated brood mare comments? Mari's reversal from horror at a mist breeding program, to facilitating this deal and talking like this, is just adding to my "Mari's getting worse but we're kind of stuck" worry.
Mari said:
Anyone else worried by the repeated brood mare comments? Mari's reversal from horror at a mist breeding program, to facilitating this deal and talking like this, is just adding to my "Mari's getting worse but we're kind of stuck" worry.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I mean, I think this makes him less moral, not more.
But the point is that he's giving up power to enact systemic change over Leaf and the world by proxy for the sake of 11 and 55 people. This is trolley problem writ large.
- Location
- The Deep Blue Sea
Am I wrong to believe that was technically *chakra* mosquitoes?
- Location
- NY
Not sure where he learned from, but he can get some level of charge off plankton, shrimp, and small fish. He also says they aren't dangerous, meaning they almost certainly aren't the chakra versions.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Point of order: We gave up a handful of markers for future votes to attempt to persuade them to vote against Hiashikage. Mari thought that the visitation rights were swingable before we dropped our concessions.
- Location
- USA
By my understanding the broader point Cariyaga (and those like me who are silently nodding our heads in the background) are making is about how the dual-clan stuff was make-or-break in the first place. So "he's [willing to give up] power to enact..." referred to the fact that we were willing to make concessions in order to get that point, or cut the deal entirely if we couldn't.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
As many as seven markers. If she manages to get visitation rights with just providing them some extra dosh, sure. That's an acceptable outcome.
If it costs us our long term bargaining power over the direction Leaf goes in the following decades for the sake of 11 people and 55 who are yet to be... That's honestly kind of viscerally disgusting to me. That's not only our personal power that we're giving up there, but the ability to enact change on the village system as a whole. The ability to improve the conditions of thousands locally, and worldwide by proxy when those improving conditions ripple outwards.
- Location
- Yes.
I'd observe that we still have the opportunity to keep said bargaining power, if we make another deal or series of deals. Though, admittedly, we don't know if we can do so at this time.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I would certainly rather Hazou be wishy-washy about things than go through with giving up that amount of power to enact change.
- Location
- Pacific standard
I didn't get the threads insistence on having the kids be legally Gouketsu too, honestly.
Mari was already talking about how they'd be a branch member of ours in a couple generations (deathworld, generations are only like 16 years). We'd get all that stuff eventually anyways, the only thing that having the kids be part of the clan would do is potentially let us teach them pang jutsu. At that point though, we could just renegotiate with the pangs.
I dunno, it was a fun and varied discussion, and i'm still proud of the consensus we came to without anyone* getting angry
*there were several people who got massively salty, but it was isolated entirely to them, so I still count it as a win ;P
Mari was already talking about how they'd be a branch member of ours in a couple generations (deathworld, generations are only like 16 years). We'd get all that stuff eventually anyways, the only thing that having the kids be part of the clan would do is potentially let us teach them pang jutsu. At that point though, we could just renegotiate with the pangs.
I dunno, it was a fun and varied discussion, and i'm still proud of the consensus we came to without anyone* getting angry
*there were several people who got massively salty, but it was isolated entirely to them, so I still count it as a win ;P
- Location
- NY
I'm concerned about what message we've sent to the rest of the clan.
This issue very well could decide whether we need to go missing again, after we've gotten into both a far better spot for enacting our future plans than we could have hoped for and the safest, most stable position we've ever been in. Hazo's actions here could very much erode the team's faith in him being able to push Uplift through, and possibly more crucially, in him being able to assure their basic well-being. Leadership means you get to order people around, but it also means you have to be responsible for those people. Think about this from, say, Noburi's perspective. Is all of this something he's going to think is worth risking everything on? We've got more than enough history with the team to make some really big asks, but we can't ask without deliveries - and this was a really fucking big ask.
This issue very well could decide whether we need to go missing again, after we've gotten into both a far better spot for enacting our future plans than we could have hoped for and the safest, most stable position we've ever been in. Hazo's actions here could very much erode the team's faith in him being able to push Uplift through, and possibly more crucially, in him being able to assure their basic well-being. Leadership means you get to order people around, but it also means you have to be responsible for those people. Think about this from, say, Noburi's perspective. Is all of this something he's going to think is worth risking everything on? We've got more than enough history with the team to make some really big asks, but we can't ask without deliveries - and this was a really fucking big ask.