Something about the usage of "bootstraps" seems significant. Just madokawish making a particularly powerful fixer-up from scratch or is it referring to multiple loops the way the phrase applied to Homu and Madoka?
I want to focus on soul gems more.I really want to get around to training our magic at some point.
We are a reality warper and we know a teleporter and a time stopper. There's a fair chance that we could make a device to detect the nearest incubator and search through the universe to destroy every single one of them at any moment we choose to do so. Only a few things prevent us from doing this:
The events of Rebellion suggest that it is possible to witchout for superpowers. Homucifer's sanity was arguable, but she certainly got power out of the deal. And even if our situation is different from Homura's, our unique mental structure and grief control still makes it plausible that we could retain control even after witching out. And witching out would almost certainly remove the 100m range restriction (at the very least).
Interesting. Witching out would certainly make us powerful. And it would be the end of the story if the thread despairs. But it also suggests that if we witchout by stuffing our soul gem full of grief or by experimenting with a witch (while still maintaining a relative level of calm) then it would not be the end of the story. Abandoning Sabrina to become Dedolere is definitely not something to be done lightly, but it wouldn't (necessarily) be a bad end.
I understood that to be a reference to the recursive nature of grief control. The more magic we use, the more grief we get, and the more powerful we are, which allows us to get more grief and use more magic and get more power, ad infinitum. We're currently limited by a 100m range, but if you removed (or even relaxed) that limit then there's very little that we couldn't do.
Rebellion was a literal one time thing with the incubators being 100% top fucking assholes. Otherwise once you hit the witchout point, YOU BECOME A WITCH. Homura transcended that by becoming the concept of Love thanks to her undying devotion to Meduka.
We'd also need enough food to get us there. Bodily functions are apparently a thing Meguca still have to do.
And if we do the same thing the Incubators were, for the same reasons, whence comes our justification for xenocide?
The incubators had nothing to do with it. Homura's deal was that her despair was tied in directly to her hope of seeing Madoka again, so the grief spiral and the hope spiral canceled each other out in a sort of divide-by-zero error.
We could probably substitute magic for food in a pinch. But actual food would be preferable, so teleporting back to Earth (or an analogous fertile planet) every so often in order to restock would be best.
Yes. But for now we're limited to a 100m range, and carrying around all of the grief we have is already unwieldy. If we can work out a permanent storage system, then it might be different. Maybe we can try stuffing a jar full of solid grief and then sealing it up. When it leaves our control radius, there would be no room for the grief to expand, so maybe it would remain solid and therefore non-corrosive? Or we can get Mami to teach us how to use hammerspace so that we can make an arbitrarily large pocket universe to hold all of our grief. But until then we (and the rest of the meguca on Earth) are reliant on the incubators.
Agreed. But we would need to at least figure out how they do the grief/energy conversion and how they grant wishes before we can seriously consider eliminating them.
The fundamental problem is not what they are doing but how. They deceive people into making contracts and hide information from them in order to make contracts more likely. And they make little effort to make the meguca life safer or happier. Even if the universe is better off from this method, it's not worth the individual suffering and lack of respect that is offered. See this page for an insightful discussion on how the incubators do (or do not) follow a Utilitarian moral system.
The incubators had literally everything to do with it. Homura would have just witched like any other girl if not for the isolation field.
The incubators were why she almost witched out in the first place, but Madoka and Sayaka and Nagisa were able to put a stop to the incubators' plan. But it was Homura who decided (on her own initiative) to go ahead and witch out for superpowers after the incubators' plan had already been stopped.
Err, we are doing it without dooming teenage girls to an eternity of despair? I'm not particularly happy with genociding an entire race either, but whatever we do we won't be on the same level of what Kyubey is doing.
Nnnope.
...Why the hell not? Also:
Please tell me we haven't actually started giving away clear seeds to others. It's not just a matter of following simple instructions, we still don't know what [REDACTED] is. Giving it to others when there's still the possibility of it blowing up in our faces is just asking to let it bite us in the ass at some point.
Step 5 is the part where Homura witched out for superpowers, which was after the Incubators had already been foiled. They were responsible for her soul gem filling up to the point where she would have been taken by Madoka, but Homura was the one responsible for preventing Madoka from taking her and deliberately inducing the witchout in order to obtain superpowers. Note that the incubators were the proximate cause of the despair in this particular case, but Homura's plan to restore Madoka was a long term plan which would have happened eventually regardless of the exact cause for her despair.
I dunno about this one. I thought it was pretty hilarious last time.
Oriko has a cleared out Aurora, but we trust the precog to see any bad shit coming.
We...ah...left one with Oriko.
There's no such thing as a hope spiral. The thing that allowed Homura to split apart a portion of Madokami's powers is because of her original wish, coupled with her going full AI YO. It has nothing to do with her witch abilities, or anything even resembling that.
...Why the hell not? Also:
Please tell me we haven't actually started giving away clear seeds to others. It's not just a matter of following simple instructions, we still don't know what [REDACTED] is. Giving it to others when there's still the possibility of it blowing up in our faces is just asking to let it bite us in the ass at some point.
You're both right. We have a number of other experiments to run before we can approve of clear seeds as being safe for general consumption, and Oriko is an important part of those experiments. My goal is that we will finish the remaining clear seed experiments tonight after Nagisa leaves.
I thought "dooming teenage girls to an eternity of despair" was what "beating entropy with grief" meant. I don't think we know enough about how the fuck this all works to suggest viable alterations to the system short of wishing away witches.
23a. Not Fate/stay night Gilgamesh, at least. Gilgamesh Wulfenbach is still on the table.
Added with some wording tweaks.
Homucufer was not a bloody witchout. It's repeated over and over that Homucifer is a demon, not a witch, that Homucifer is powered by love, not despair, and Homura already has a witch form that very conspicuously is not Homucifer.
