Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
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- naruto rational 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
Pain seems like a great guy so praise from him is especially strong. Jiraiya's pardon was not conditional on jiraiya surviving. This shows that Jiraiya trusted Oro to be beneficial to Leaf even if Jiraiya is not alive to force him. That Oro said the ritual was a violation of agency when asked what it was, suggests that he cares about agency being violated. Caring about agency being violated is an ethical thing to do.
Some other things as well:
Oro joined akatsuki suggesting shared goals with Pain before the split, and pain seemed uplifty. Tsunade does not treat Oro as I would expect if she thought he was a monster. Oro's basement was never looted, perhaps meaning him going missing nin was only to appease Leaf's public opinion but the hokage still trusted him (weak evidence). Supposedly Oro went missing-nin only after Leaf tried to kill him and Asuma seemed to be channeling the 3rd hokage to manipulate Oro, suggesting loyalty to leaf.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I don't think this suggestion really reflects the nature of the challenge at hand. This isn't a "you need two (2) Primordial Sealmasters to make it to the goal" kind of challenge, this is a "we do not even know if this is possible to succeed" kind of challenge and the stakes are everything ever.
In scenarios like this, you don't make a halfhearted effort and then say "good enough". Making Kagome into a Primordial Sealmaster is a good idea and we should undoubtedly be pursuing that, but you lock that in and still have to ask the question of whether we can be stacking the deck harder in our favour. You seize on every advantage you can get, leave no stone unturned, and the only reason you would pass up additional support is if doing so would cause even worse problems than what you're already trying to solve.
Orochimaru is already, by my estimations, likely to recreate Primordial Sealing on his own, whether we help him or not. Keeping it to ourselves until he figures it out allows us to try and more quickly shrink the power differential between us, but ngl I don't think a couple years head-start will be enough for us to kill him. Not when we're tied up with Necromancy and a need to pursue the "win the Dragonwar" tech tree above the "kill Orochimaru" tech tree. Maybe not even if we dedicated all our effort to the "kill Oro" tech tree; we don't know how many precautions against death he has, so we can't know if a given level of preparation would be sufficient. Which means, by hook or by crook, unless Pein himself rises from the grave and uses one of his Rinnegan powers to suck Orochimaru's soul right out of his body, we will have to live in a world where Orochimaru gains Primordial Sealing.
The only exception to this is if Primordial Sealing is truly overwhelming powerful. If this is true, it means 1) Orochimaru with Primordial Sealing at his disposal would become that much more incredibly powerful, perhaps to the point where he has enough strength to easily conquer the world. As Noumero said earlier, he would then do this as it's always instrumentally valuable if you can do it with minimal cost. But it also means 2) that if we invest heavily into the field early, we may develop an Orokiller weapon before he unlocks PS on his own.
This is why we should do some exploration of Primordial Sealing before making our decision. If it is too powerful, we know that we cannot allow Orochimaru to have it and that we may be able to prevent that outcome. If it is not quite so overwhelmingly strong, then neither of those statements are true. Orochimaru would find himself stronger but still unable to take on the whole world, and our best efforts in the field would not be likely to create an Orokiller in time. This is a single-dimensional model of what is undoubtedly a multi-dimensional question, of course, but I think the axes are tightly coupled enough that it works for a first-order approximation of expectations.
And again, we need to stack the deck in our favour as much as we possibly can. If our preliminary exploration of Primordial Sealing does not indicate that it would make Orochimaru "Existential threat" strong, then we have an imperative to enlist his help for the Dragonwar. This is on top of any other allies we may recruit for the task, like Kagome or a resurrected Jiraiya or whoever else we can find. This is not a matter of convenience, it is a matter of survival. Even with all this on our side, we may yet fail; reality has no obligation to be kind to us. This is why we can't afford to do anything less than our best, why we can't afford to leave options on the table. If it is possible to get Orochimaru's help on this project without dooming humanity, we have an obligation to do that. And we will know whether that "if" is true once we start exploring the field ourselves.
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I don't agree with this. We've "enlisted" the help of the Sealmasters of Leaf. What did we get? Some peons to do the drudgery of making HOWS and no actual help with the research whatsoever.
Why would Oro be different? He's a better sealmaster, but he isn't inclined to respect Hazou as an equal and he's dangerous to interact with. Hazou is doing far better at figuring out the Great Seal than he is, and I see no reason why his help would significantly close that gap. Esp since the problem rn is "make stat go up" something which older ninja are terrible at.
If there's a decent reason to think that his help in particular would be useful, I'd be inclined to share more information. But the strategy of "throw bodies at the problem" doesn't seem to have worked. Hazou has come up with everything useful so far, and I think we can expect that to continue.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
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I actually very strongly disagree with this. We crossed a threshold, recently, with Orochimaru -- he is now sending us his notes, something that I seriously doubt he'd bother with if he thought we weren't worth his time. The fact that we are worth his time, then, is an update in the direction of him seeing us as able to meaningfully contribute. Not to say that he sees as an equal -- far from it -- but we have shown him that we are legitimately very fucking good at sealing, and to ignore that is, I think, a mistake.
I personally support teaching Oro Primordial Sealing. Oro is unlikely to ruin the multiverse so badly that it's actually worse than if the dragons ate everyone. On the other hand, he's pretty likely to stop existential threats, since ninjaland is where he keeps his stuff.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
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...Also, he can be a counterweight against Pein, should Akatsuki manage to rez him.
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Well, putting aside that they're called Harumitsu's Outstanding World-Saving seal for a reason, I covered this topic I would say pretty thoroughly in my initial post on the topic:
Admittedly that is a very large paragraph, too large to just cite and be done with, so I'll go over what I think are the key points.
Our approach to sealing tends to go as such: we identify some effect that we know is possible, and then we try to tweak and adapt it into something with far-ranging applications. This is our best way of approaching it because we have very little intuition on what effects are possible and which ones aren't, but a great amount of intuition on what can be done with specific effects.
Orochimaru, by contrast, showed us in the Orbularium a seal that we could never have come up with. It's powerful - intrinsically, not as a byproduct of how it's used - and it's bizarre and unique in a way that you only get when you take your sealing intuition deep into the realm of what might be possible, the realm of tradeoffs and islands of stability, and find something impressive there.
This is the kind of insight that we'll frankly need if we want to progress in the field as much as possible. Most of our best work is built on what other sealmasters have built, what they've proven possible, and a highly skilled sealmaster like Orochimaru is exactly the sort of person to create seals that do things we would never have tried, which yet might inspire us to new heights.
Moreover, whatever avenue Orochimaru pursues is an avenue Hazou does not need to pursue, and vice versa. If we consider this for a moment a game of testing various concepts in Primordial Sealing, just pure scattershot to see if any of them are dramatically easier in the new system, two agents whose scattershots are visible to the other can work twice as fast as any one agent alone. If there is valuable progress to be made towards solving the problem of the Great Seal, and only long hard work will reveal that to us, well, many hands make light work.
What do you hope to gain from regularly interacting with Oro? Infuriating him by being better than him at Sealing until he dissects Hazou? That's a very real possibility, by some interpretations of that TN 80 roll, we were pretty fucking close to it. Who gives a shit whether he thinks Hazou is his equal at Sealing? He doesn't think of, and will likely never think of Hazou as a peer, just a fascinating insect.
Or at least not until Hazou can punch his head off.
I don't think this is right, Hazou has mostly stuck to seals that have precedent, yes, but he's been beset by an incredible research backlog. As a direct result of having far too low Sealing to accomplish things for a long time. I am confident in the Hivemind to think of interesting seals on their own once we've run out of seals we need to adjust.
There's no reason Kagome can't be this for us. I don't feel that Oro brings enough to the table to justify the very real risks from bringing him on board at this time. My mind isn't set, but he's a dangerous animal and difficult to predict. Treating him like he isn't is foolish IMO.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
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I disagree with this interpretation of Orochimaru. He's not an idiot. He grew up in a world that featured the likes of Hiruzen and Minato. There exist people that are just that good in specific fields. And even if he did suspect that it was due to some biological feature of us... he has better options than vivisecting the one person he's met in the past two years that he can talk shop with when it comes to sealing. Options he is, in fact, in the middle of exercising.
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I for one have no qualms with exploiting a monster for the sake of obtaining great power.
I mean, look through that backlog. How many of those seals are truly original ideas, not built up from other seals that we already know work? Do any of them strike you as having landing in an island of stability, or do we aim to push a seal in X direction and hope we don't hit the difficulty wall? Our ideas are very good and promise a lot of value and I'm very excited to one day get to actualize them, but they still don't cover the same bases that someone like Orochimaru demonstrably covers in his own research.
Personally, I don't think Orochimaru can be characterized as a difficult to predict dangerous animal. Orochimaru no doubt considers himself the sanest person in the setting, which doesn't mean all that much but does mean that he considers his actions to be the reasonable and sane responses to the situations he's in.
Orochimaru is not an unpredictable animal as liable to bit your hand off as accept food from it. He's a predictable being with a peculiar mindset and a repugnant moral system. If you understand what he wants and how he thinks, it's easy to predict how he'll respond to a given scenario. Granted, understanding what he wants and how he thinks is non-trivial, but some among the hivemind have pretty good track records at predicting him at this point.
We have heard from Orochimaru himself that he aims to recreate the Great Seal. We have seen him voluntarily send us research notes for feedback and review. We have conspicuously not seen him abduct Hazou into his basement to coerce him to generate sealing ideas. And, you know, maybe we're still walking a fine line on that last one, but we're still walking it. Orochimaru hasn't woken up one day feeling 50% more kidnappy and decided "you know what, now I feel like abducting Hazou would actually be a great idea!" He's consistent, and that means we can work with him as long as we know how to stay within the lines.
And hey, I covered this too! We're the first-mover in this situation and Asuma is a 100% earnest collaborator with us on this topic, so we have quite a lot of room to arrange the scenario such that we can cooperate with Orochimaru without him coercing us or causing us any harm. We can plan it out as much as we feel the need to, put pieces into place, get other people on board if we need to, anything necessary to make sure this goes right. We have the Hokage on our side and all the time we need to prepare: if we can't make that work then we may as well jump in a caldera preemptively.
And sure, Kagome can help us with this as well. But I said "many hands make light work", and that can only mean more hands is ever appreciated. You don't win the Dragonwar with half-measures. You get Kagome on board and then still ask yourself if recruiting Orochimaru can raise your overall chances of survival. We do not know of any point where we can afford to say "good enough" and start leaving options on the table.
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Snake uncle is bad, for a preposterously high value of 'bad', but not an X Risk. Dragons are an extremely imminent X Risk.
Loop him in.
EDIT: spelling
Loop him in.
EDIT: spelling
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I think you are really trying hard to sell the giving the primordial sealing to Oro here.
You are really outplaying the emergency that the dragon has, when clearly things are fine for now. Right now, the hows seal provide a stopgap countermeasure and the dragons are docile. Your point about them being active again is fair enough, and yet? We already have actions to deal with that. Isn't that why the conclave bosses are called unit and united for?
Furthermore, I think you two are really downplaying the whole part of "Oro's endgoal not being a nightmare scenario" and somehow we can lead him out from that. I think it's a bit naive to think that someone like hazou, who isn't even as powerful as Oro is can lead him from that path and into uplift is just an impossibility.
More of his ideas of how the seal works, which he has already shown to have when talking with hazou. Compare that to the rest of leaf's sealmasters which accomplished nothing
I don't disagree that our backlog is mostly composed of seals that are modifications of other seals. It works! They're revolutionary or at least skywalkers were.
I just don't agree that we are categorically incapable of doing what Oro does re: sealing. It seems silly to extrapolate that much from one (1) seal of his. It's more difficult for us, sure, but we can do it.
Indeed, for PS we will need to do that. There will be no established seals to go from. So maybe wait and see how that goes before making grand pronouncements.
This the same hivemind that almost got killed by Oro when meeting him for the first time, then vivisected by him at a party, and then almost tanked the first Dragonbits deal with him later?
I uhhhh don't trust us to get this right. I'm sure it's possible to thread this needle, but coordinating people is hard and often cannot be done. Especially if people want to do risky cool things for drama.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
"clearly things are fine right now" is not a very compelling argument when we know things are actively getting worse. The Great Seal continues to degrade and it is a nigh-certainty that unless we do something in time the rest of the dragons will be released one by one into the world.
Can we just kill them all as they emerge? I dunno, the Archaeopteryx could certainly kill them with enough effort. Until they couldn't. The Crusade will most likely be able to deal with the Dragons that have currently escaped, but the next ones? And the ones after that, and the ones after that, and the ones after that?
These are beings designed to be relevant on the power scale of the Tenfold Abomination, a monster by all accounts about as powerful as the Sage himself. There's ample room for the Dragons to continue power-scaling, and past a certain point we may simply not be capable of killing them anymore, even with an army at our backs.
Forward-thinking is critical here. The stronger Dragons haven't been unsealed yet, but they will unless we stop them. Will we be able to? Will we have enough time, enough skill, to make a difference here? I don't know, and you don't either. But we have to try, and we have to try our hardest because literally everything is on the line here. "Clearly things are fine for now" just means we have hope, it means circumstance has given us time enough to try, to maybe, just maybe win this race against time. Will we need all that time? I dunno, maybe we'll finish the job and the Dragons will have still been relatively manageable. But I'm not going to wager all of reality on us being so lucky.
As for Orochimaru, I do not plan to lead him out of his ideals and ambitions. That's a fool's errand if I ever saw one. No, he needs to die, or the world can never know peace. Even if we collaborate with him on saving reality from the Dragons, we'll keep plotting his death until such time as we can end him without imperiling reality. It's as simple as that.
- Location
- Pacific standard
Hey, how about we spend a prep day on a very constrained one time use seal to guarantee alignment for a deal?
I'm actually not sure who would give the other more TYS, if we got Leeran hypersight or something similar going.
If we could magically guarantee good faith for even like, one paragraph of text, I believe in the thread to come up with a deal to turn Oro. We can offer the man a deal he cannot refuse, literally his brother resurrected, immortality among like minded peers, interesting research topics, the curiosity of ~50 minds funneled into one action plan.
With Mari we can trust her continued actions and desire for retirement to trust the effect we had on her. We don't know Orochimaru nearly well enough to do the same with him, so I think we need the magical effect. If Mari shared the eater of lies ritual with us that would be a fantastic source to base a seal from
I'm actually not sure who would give the other more TYS, if we got Leeran hypersight or something similar going.
If we could magically guarantee good faith for even like, one paragraph of text, I believe in the thread to come up with a deal to turn Oro. We can offer the man a deal he cannot refuse, literally his brother resurrected, immortality among like minded peers, interesting research topics, the curiosity of ~50 minds funneled into one action plan.
With Mari we can trust her continued actions and desire for retirement to trust the effect we had on her. We don't know Orochimaru nearly well enough to do the same with him, so I think we need the magical effect. If Mari shared the eater of lies ritual with us that would be a fantastic source to base a seal from
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Sure, we aren't categorically incapable of that kind of project. I've even proposed a couple myself! One is this weird bubble shell thing that would react hostilely with any chakra constructs, diminishing the strength of incoming jutsu (and outgoing jutsu, too. You also really would not want to toss a seal into it). I loaded it up with specific details and put in a line about how if you wanted to modify the effect you would be able to increase the amount of substance produced pretty readily but changing anything else would be particularly difficult.
I like that seal idea. I'm proud of that seal idea. I haven't seen much else like it before or since. These ideas, we can do them, but they're not intuitive. We don't churn them out through natural random discussion like we churn out, idk, our next plan to invent radio or something. It's like asking us to write with our non-dominant hand.
Which is to say, this is very much not something we're good at, yet it appears to be something Orochimaru is good at. If you think the Orbularium example isn't enough, consider the other stuff we've seen from him, like the Cannibal seal (no matter which theory of What That Was you subscribe to, it's quite something) and whatever effect (undetermined source but most likely a seal effect) targeted Hazou with pride-injuring whispers, perhaps identifying him as a Uchiha relative and seeking to spread discord among the would-be invaders. "A seal that targets people of a specific genetic heritage and makes inaudible whispers in their ear" isn't something I'd come up with anytime soon, I'll tell you that much.
You're right, we do keep making missteps, arguably more often than we get it right. But I've noticed, in the discourse surrounding these events, there's been a steadily growing rate of people saying that they understand how Orochimaru thinks and know how to navigate this situation. I've seen them in full "I told you so!" mode because they were ignored and things went wrong in exactly the way they predicted; they really did tell us so.
If your point is that the people with their thumb on the pulse may fail to sway the hivemind at large to take Oro-optimal actions, that's a reasonable concern. But I would say in this particular instance, the fact that we're set up to use our first-mover advantage to coordinate with Asuma (and any resources the Hokage brings to bear) means that any such wildcard plays will be heavily mitigated by IC sanity checks. Asuma won't have the transcendent clarity I've seen members of the hivemind occasionally shine with when discussing Orochimaru's behaviour patterns, but he's old hat by now at keeping the snake satisfied and he won't hesitate to leverage that experience for our sake.
Given that our typical Orochimaru conversation is sudden, unexpected, and face to face with no backup and the promise of immediate destruction if we anger him, it's night and day compared to how safe this operation is, even if we fail to leverage those of the hivemind who can read Orochimaru like an open book.
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- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Kagome: "I don't think you're taking Necromancy seriously."
Hazou: "You know what, you're right."
Hazou: [immediately rediscovers a lost art]
Hazou: "Pretty damn far means pretty damn far."
Kagome: "...I've never been more proud."
We need a Kagome Interlude about this.
Hazou: "You know what, you're right."
Hazou: [immediately rediscovers a lost art]
Hazou: "Pretty damn far means pretty damn far."
Kagome: "...I've never been more proud."
- Location
- Yes.
HPMOR said:
@Inferno Vulpix I appreciate your detailed analyses on the Oro situation! Most of my disagreements have already been mentioned, but one that I don't think has come up (at least at the time I'm writing) is that Oro learning about Primordial Sealing (PS) massively affects how useful and interesting we become to him which is a NOT good. On the one hand, he's less likely to kill us, but like you outlined he already is disincentived to do that right now.
In a world where he learns PS and we have Earthshaping (ES) at 60, I think there's a high chance he forces us to be his personal blank creation engine operating at max capacity with minimal concern for our priorities and well-being. Asuma won't push back too hard since it's directly contributing to the dragonwar. He wasn't even willing to prevent Oro capturing and killing Keiko which is a much more flagrant contravention of Leaf's laws, his authority, and more politically costly for him.
Oro hasn't really demonstrated an ability or willingness to work pro-socially over long periods of time with anybody without the personal power to stand up to him (S-rankers) except for Kabuto and perhaps Asuma. Maybe Mari or Ami can pull a rabbit out of a hat here. But giving him something he really wants where we're the only permanent supply of the raw materials for it is something we want to put off as long as possible
In a world where he learns PS and we have Earthshaping (ES) at 60, I think there's a high chance he forces us to be his personal blank creation engine operating at max capacity with minimal concern for our priorities and well-being. Asuma won't push back too hard since it's directly contributing to the dragonwar. He wasn't even willing to prevent Oro capturing and killing Keiko which is a much more flagrant contravention of Leaf's laws, his authority, and more politically costly for him.
Oro hasn't really demonstrated an ability or willingness to work pro-socially over long periods of time with anybody without the personal power to stand up to him (S-rankers) except for Kabuto and perhaps Asuma. Maybe Mari or Ami can pull a rabbit out of a hat here. But giving him something he really wants where we're the only permanent supply of the raw materials for it is something we want to put off as long as possible
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- He/Him
Funny, but to me it's less so "you're right" and moreso "this what I've BEEN doing this whole time and it only just paid off."