Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
HAZOU: Talk to Keiko about that.
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
- how about no
Ah, but therein lies the problem: I was hoping we could/will eventually amass enough wealth through our munchkinry to have unprecedented levels of 'fuck you' money. I'm talking enough cash/capital to either buyout or out compete every noteworthy business in the countries surrounding Fire country and expanding from there.
By completely creating, and maintaining control of, all of the means of production directly or through shell companies in a now industrializing world we would become the effective sovereigns of the continent.
It won't be easy but it will certainly be interesting especially once our rivals are forced into bankruptcy and then into banditry so we can sic our technologically advanced security forces on them.
What's cooler than magical superhumans fighting to the death with sign language, eldritch doodles, and a blatant disregard for the sensibilities of physics and thermodynamics?
Mecha magical superhumans fighting to the death with sign language, eldritch doodles, and a blatant disregard for the sensibilities of physics and thermodynamics with frickin' laser beams.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm down.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's called Gurren Lagann, and it uses Rule of Cool as an explicit law of physics. It's available on Crunchyroll.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
So that's how we've gotta fix the world. Just create a seal that adds a law of physics. Can't be that hard, right?
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
DO NOT GO TO BEAR.
- Location
- Pacific standard
Hey Velorian if it doesn't fall into spoiler territory, on a scale of 0-100 how'd we do in preparation for that convo, and from 0-10 how surprised are you at whatever level we did?
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
That legitimately went better than I dared to hope.
- Location
- how about no
This brings up an interesting philosophical dilemma: how much should we respect a person's wishes if that person wants (or believes it is necessary for whatever reason) to be miserable while we want them to be happy?
We should not gloss over someone else's guilt lest it fester, but we should also help them when it seems they have let it consume them.
Moderation will be key here, imo.
I can see why the denizens of the MfD universe might view its creation as a Bad Move, but I, for one, have enjoyed its existence quite a bit.
Huh.
Don't mind me, just going to go have a nice little existential crisis wondering about possible beings deriving various forms of enjoyment from my own existence.
But is it rational? Does it have the protagonists engage in ruthless capitalism/mercantilism? Do they sufficiently crush their enemies?
But overall anime just doesn't scratch my entertainment itch anymore since I've started this quest. It's hard to go back to yelling ineffectually at characters on a screen whenever they make stupid decisions when I can
So congratulations: you've ruined anime for me by giving me something better, you jerk(s). /s <3
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yup, my bad. Didn't matter.
Yeah, I was using it to check whether the outcome ended up in his favor or not. If it were a situation where keeping something secret was important then I would have done it differently.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Could you clarify what you mean by the former? For the latter, not so surprised when I found it was @Evenstar taking the lead, but viewing it in the context of the hivemind as a whole, and assuming 1 is "Hey, look, they've found a way to weaponise the new ruling" and 10 is "Hey, look, they haven't tried to weaponise the new ruling", probably a 7. The hivemind has a certain history of erring on the side of causing NPC psychological issues rather than ameliorating them. Also, dedicating an entire plan to addressing said issues is not unknown, but rare.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
Inasmuch as it doesn't threaten that person's long-term functionality — which profound misery and suicidal inclinations usually do. People have a right to do whatever they want to themselves as long as their decision-making isn't so compromised they're sabotaging their own existence, at which point all concerns about "agency" and "respecting other people's decisions" are overridden by "not letting people die pointlessly".
At least, that's the point where I'd say that interventions are not simply acceptable but required.
Rational fiction in a nutshell.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Plan Cache is up and ready!
Speaking personally, I would recommend a) following through with showering Mari with affection, b) talking to Yuno, and c) talking to the clan about whether or not there's anything more in-depth than 'keep watching in case he explodes' they'd like to test regarding Hazou possibly being possessed.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Suffer as I have suffered.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yes.
Edit: Sorry, couldn't resist. Hazō dispelled offscreen, because it never hurts to do so when you don't have a comprehensive list of chakra beasts native to the area.
- Location
- Yes.
Wait, Konoha doesn't keep track of this stuff?
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
- Location
- how about no
Who defines what is and is not pointless?
Clearly the guilt ridden party believes that their actions are, on some level, appropriate. The second concerned party is usually biased towards forgiving the guilt ridden party because they are going out of their way to interact with said sad person in the first place. What if a third party arrives and disagrees with the initial concerned party by saying that the guilt ridden party has not gone far enough in their acts of contrition? How many additional parties are we willing to listen to before we try to reach a consensus?
Wow there's so many of us. We should make our own online community to commiserate over the lack of adequate entertainment. Maybe call it "rational" or something... /s
- Location
- Pacific standard
In terms of 1 is "every single word Hazou spoke started another cascade of negative emotions and thought trains in Mari, and she resolves to become the Heartbreaker as soon as possible" while 100 is literally the best you can imagine it going, on the order of "wow Mari is perfectly fixed forever and Hazuos speech was so good it gave her three new aspects and 2000 xp"
I'd be expecting around an 80 on there. Way above average, but still not resolving anything; just opening the door for further healing while not causing *too* much damage in the interim.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That definitely sounds like spoiler material, then. But if she does become the Heartbreaker as soon as possible, I'm sure you'll know soon enough...
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
This is why I am waiting on tenterhooks for the relaunch of the other ratquest.
- Location
- Kiev, Ukraine
Sounds like quest tag to me
Sounds ominous to me. Too paranoid? Maybe. Don't want my heart broken. Again.
Evenstar
Triple Jump Unlocked
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So, postmortem.
Effects, in my judgment:
It's somewhat difficult to tell if Mari was actually affected, or is pretending to be. She doesn't really react much, but having seen others make a "the penny just dropped" expression in real life, it's something that IMO would take a lot of skill to fake and hit at the right time - so both from faith in Mari and my actual experience, I think she's had a real realization.
Whether it's the one we wanted her to have, we can only wait and see, but her quoting Keiko is a very good sign. She'd naturally float to top of mind as the last person who called Mari on her own bullshit like this.
So I would call the plan overall tentatively successful.
I would like to stress, however, that it'd be very easy for us to lose whatever progress we've made here if we don't back our words up with actions. Let Mari decide for herself what help she needs - maybe prompt her a little, if it looks like she needs that - but don't keep treating her the way we have been. If we do that, this whole speech dissolves into so many pretty words, just another attempt to keep a strong tool up and running and on our side. Mari knows too many ways to manipulate people, so it's easy for her to pattern-match incompetence to malice. Don't let her do that.
TLDR: This opens the door to healing. Mari has to decide whether to step through it or not. We should help make that choice easier for her. (And not by ordering her to do it.)
Things that could have been done better:
Effects, in my judgment:
It's somewhat difficult to tell if Mari was actually affected, or is pretending to be. She doesn't really react much, but having seen others make a "the penny just dropped" expression in real life, it's something that IMO would take a lot of skill to fake and hit at the right time - so both from faith in Mari and my actual experience, I think she's had a real realization.
Whether it's the one we wanted her to have, we can only wait and see, but her quoting Keiko is a very good sign. She'd naturally float to top of mind as the last person who called Mari on her own bullshit like this.
So I would call the plan overall tentatively successful.
I would like to stress, however, that it'd be very easy for us to lose whatever progress we've made here if we don't back our words up with actions. Let Mari decide for herself what help she needs - maybe prompt her a little, if it looks like she needs that - but don't keep treating her the way we have been. If we do that, this whole speech dissolves into so many pretty words, just another attempt to keep a strong tool up and running and on our side. Mari knows too many ways to manipulate people, so it's easy for her to pattern-match incompetence to malice. Don't let her do that.
TLDR: This opens the door to healing. Mari has to decide whether to step through it or not. We should help make that choice easier for her. (And not by ordering her to do it.)
Things that could have been done better:
- It was probably dumb for me to put the eye question in the plan. On reflection, it would have been seen as accusatory - which it was - and gotten Mari to close herself off more, not open up.
- Similarly, assaulting Mari with a lot of suggestions about what she ought to do right after inflicting an insight of this potential magnitude on her wouldn't have been fair to her.
- Because of the unnecessary "So what do" section in particular, the plan genuinely could have been brought under the length requirement. So I've cost y'all 1 XP. Frankly, I'm not that torn up about this, but it's worth noting for in future: if the plan's overlength, there's likely a deeper flaw to be addressed.
- I put a little too much of my own personal experiences into the plan. Mari's issues are similar to those I've had & seen in others, but not identical. Outright telling her to try and reconcile with the Heartbreaker is a non-starter; "you should try to accept the part of you that wants to torture people to death" is not something she'd even consider. Not right now, anyway.
- Again in retrospect, the final closing section could be taken as threatening - "I'll protect you from yourself if I have to" is a line that could definitely be misread. Fortunately, we never got there.
- I deliberately built this plan in such a way that Hazou would have some latitude to correct for my errors, and holy shit did he ever. A more restrictive, "do this exact thing" style could well have been catastrophic here.
- On this point, I'd like to thank whoever it was that counselled me against putting words directly in Hazou's mouth. That was good advice and I'm glad I took it.
- I'd also particularly like to point out the structure of "Goal first, means second." This makes Hazou better able to use his agency to avoid boneheaded mistakes, because we communicate our actual intent to the QMs - they don't have to guess about it. This structure doesn't seem to be in wide use right now, but I think it worked well and I recommend using it more in future.
- Also note the "Let her duck this" for the eye question: I think that may well have contributed to the QMs' choice to let Hazou not ask, because I'd made clear it was primarily a rhetorical move.
- We reached out, empathized, and engaged with Mari's emotions.
- To be blunt, the hivemind has low emotional intelligence. The general feeling seems to be that emotions are messy, confusing, unreliable and untrustworthy. This is often true; we can be easily misled by them. But at the same time, humans have emotions because they were adaptive in the ancestral environment. To the extent that people are still people and still have social interactions with each other, a lot of what emotions do is still useful to us.
- In particular, we have a bad habit of trying to brute-force our way through interactions with pure presence & intimidation. ("I get my way because I have a big stick.") This rarely if ever goes our way: it turns out that people react badly to having their emotions ignored!
- On the other hand, our attempts to use empathy and insight tend to turn out well. (See: The only time we've ever managed to get Ami to owe us a favor.)
- We engaged our Aspects. This is a cynical, mechanical way to look at point 2, but it remains the case that our build is significantly better at cooperation than defection. We've said we want to play Hazou this way, so we should commit to what the build is good at when we can.
- Preferring Rapport and Empathy lets us tag "Open Mouth, Insert Foot."
- Giving an impassioned speech lets us tag "Creative Idealist."
- Pulling on Mari's history as Mari-Sensei lets us tag "Team Uplift."
- Pulling on Mari's history with Jiraiya and her status as a Gouketsu lets us tag "The Hokage Was My New Dad."
- That's four tags for a +12 bonus, letting us punch a full tier above our weight class. That matters.
- Note that I didn't do any of this deliberately, it just fell out of treating Mari as a real person who matters and who we care about.
- The plan incorporated feedback. We're generally good at this, but I want to stress it again anyway.
- Go look at my original proto-plan again. Now compare to the final plan. While the core idea ("use your connection with her to show Mari that the Heartbreaker is a coping strategy") is still there, it's buried and muddled beneath a whole load of crap. I don't think my original plan would have had results anywhere near what we actually submitted.
- I also had some really bad ideas in my early drafts of the plan. A lot of them got torn out of it by other people's critique.
- Specialist knowledge is useful, but I too can be an idiot or miss things!
- We were willing to go over the wordcount limit in order to ensure the plan was good.
- Despite my earlier statement on "the fact it's too long means there's probably some error in it", the fact is that optimizing deeper for wordcount would likely have destroyed some of the nuance that let Hazou use his agency well here, given where we were cutting at that point. Overall, I still think submitting the slightly-too-long plan was the better play.
- Obviously we can't do this every time or we'll really start bleeding XP, but it's good that the thread is willing to keep the option of going over available for plans we feel are important enough.
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