I agree that we'll need to discuss this with Yuno at some point. Honestly, I feel this will require strong social skills to handle the issue ... skills which I doubt we currently have to an adequate extent.
The longer we leave this, the further entrenched she becomes. Mari noted that she's constrained in what she can do about this situation by what we said; we need to un-block her so she can work to her full potential.
I actually disagree on the strong social skills part. If you're talking numerically/mechanically, we need to be able to beat Yuno's rolls. Doing that with Noburi in the room for assists is not complicated because Yuno has almost certainly not invested anything into social skills. If you're talking character-wise, this plan plays to our strengths: earnestness and honesty and caring. We have the skill to pull that off.
In general, my response is: it seems to me that this issue cannot be solved with one meeting, even with Mari-level preparations. I could see ourselves trying to deepen our understanding of Yuno's beliefs, and help Yuno understand our own. Then, we can try to reconcile her views with our own (hopefully). All that over different encounters/missions together. Doing that in one sitting screams to me as incredibly difficult, without Mari-level social skills and preparations. As it is, this plan looks to me as if we would be denying what Yuno sees as her forte/worth/passion (murder), perhaps the only way she has to truly express herself. That's a lot to take in the face. I don't want to imagine what it'd do to her.
No, it can't be solved with one meeting. This is strictly setup. I want to accomplish two things:
- Get very clear on how we, Hazo, actually feel about Jashin.
- Communicate why we're concerned about Yuno's Jashin-worship.
I'd also like to set the tone for further conversations - specifically, being super honest and clear.
I think I have a sufficient model of Yuno's beliefs to navigate this situation: namely, she generally feels pretty lost, and someone who fits into the traditional power structures (e.g., powerful ninja) approached her with something that would offer her a sense of belonging and a way to make sense of the world. We need to offer her the same thing. Quite frankly, we should have gotten her more firmly on board with Uplift previously so that she wouldn't have been vulnerable to that sort of thing, but c'est la vie.
Asking her questions that she can consider at her own leisure sets us up. The win here isn't going to come from destroying her with facts and logic: it's going to come from a place of building trust. I fundamentally believe that, if Yuno felt safe and secure, she'd choose her family. She'd choose Noburi and Hazo and Kei and Snowflake. She would not choose murder. We just need to get her to a place where she feels like she can actually trust us. The girl wants a family. We need to show her that we can be that family.
Were we dishonest previously? Did we lie?
I'm not sure Yuno is able to understand that murder can feel bad. I don't think we understand Yuno very well at all. Honestly, if Hazou could take it, I wish he could try to sit with Yuno and let her expound on what it's like to be Yuno on her murder mission. Alternatively:
I was fairly careful not to say that we lied, but if you read through the plan and the update, we certainly weren't maximally transparent and honest. My impression was that we were trickling her information and perspectives to drive her to a conclusion. This colossally failed.
I don't think that understanding Yuno's internal logic is going to be tremendously useful, although I do note that my plan does ask about some pretty key areas - specifically, how she's loving and kind and caring while also suggesting that we commit mass murder in a tone and manner which would be better suited to suggesting a restaurant. If we can sell her on the idea that everyone deserves life and dignity, we can leave her to Mari and Ami to put back together.
I suspect that a
big block here is her sense of self-worth. If she acknowledges that everyone deserves life and dignity, she needs to confront the fact that all of Isan treated her terribly. Coming to terms with the fact that your abusers were actually extremely abusive is sufficiently emotionally painful that people flinch away from it. Right now, she can minimize these feelings by reminding herself that she sucks and it wasn't important that they treat her well, because she was corrupted and they were in the right etc. etc. (This is categorically
false, but it's a belief she can hold to minimize pain.)
Her internal logic isn't going to be consistent. It's going to have miles-wide holes in it. Going through it so we can figure out what language to speak might help, but, again, we aren't going to fix this by demonstrating that she's Wrong. She is, but that's not the issue. The issue is emotional.
I mean, as Shikamaru put it, the unplausible odds of Hazou's successes point to something intervening in his favour. I think it's fair to say that Hazou does have Jashin's favour. We don't want to include in our message more uncertainty noise than necessary, unless we are aiming for a specific effect. Are we?
We could have the favor of Nihsaj, Jashin's good twin, who takes action to thwart Jashin at every turn. We have some probably-supernatural entity helping us out. Jashin specifically? Who knows.
I don't think it is a good idea to mention it scares him. Yuno received this reaction too much in the past, it might trigger a reaction like "so even my family thinks I'm a monster" or a "they don't trust me" of some sort.
I agree this might be sensitive. That's why I included the 'because we love her'. When this plan is closer to passing, I'll probably beef it up to 400 words and be much more clear: we're scared of what might
happen to her.
It is true that we are afraid of what she could do, and we want to trust her. So, perhaps once we set up a safe space for Yuno to express herself and let her know that we care about her wellbeing, we could try to frame this as a question like "Can we trust you to abide by Birth Jashinism or Uplift?". It's a loaded question, and we'll need a good buildup to it, but in the end I think it's the thing that matters with Yuno. That she isn't another Hidan in the making.
I will not vote for plans with loaded or leading questions. Yuno deserves our respect. I will also not vote for plans where the endgame is converting her to Birth Jashinism.
We don't believe in Birth Jashinism. We believe in Uplift.
Can Yuno understand that? She was neither loved nor safe in her childhood, and she's kinda in a broken state right now. It could be an amazing argument if Yuno were pregnant, though.
She's seen a whole bunch of kids who were safe and loved in their childhoods and boy do I bet she wishes that
she'd gotten to grow up safe and loved. Creating a world where no one has to go through the pain you went through is a powerful motivator.
I like the tone a lot. Still, would we actually be okay with accepting Yuno's answer if it were against Uplift?
No. But I don't think that Yuno is actually going to ultimately declare for Jashin. It would mean sacrificing her family, and she's not going to do that.
