The thing that everybody is piling on now is that this guy wants to do this right now. Today. This is not the case. This is a hypothetical training time in Homura-stop to learn enchantment without paying for it time wise, because it's hard to be interrupted in the span between seconds.
There is no suggestion to grab Sayaka right this instant and do this thing, just that when we finally get around to it, maybe we can get her in on the lessons too because it's a useful thing to know for your average Meguca, which she is.
So you can all stop yelling at each other for misinterpreting when you each happen to be talking about?
...
Or am I just assuming that the problem is the same as last argument because I want it to be that easy?
Actually that was Capn's argument. To do the enchantment thing before we could even get a baseline as to what Sayaka is even capable of. Ugo specifically advocates first boosting Sayaka's confidence by developing her conventional skills and refocusing her goals and purpose as a magical girl. Capn wants the enchantment practice before that and even before her first witch fight. Reread the argument. It's there.
IMO Capn is addressing 'failure' in a way that's unproductive, irrelevant, impractical, and all around pointless. Enchantment is an advance skill, that provides little benefit without the proper context. It isn't something we should be teaching when Sayaka hasn't even developed the basics yet.
It's the equivalent of taking a math curriculum, skipping 20 to 30 lessons and then being given a test the next day. That's clearly and pointlessly unfair.
Yeah, all these ideas are falling under the "what's the point of investing research time into them" question.
So I'm going to ask that:
What's the point of investing research time into these and why are the benefits good enough to make a success more useful than using that time on dewitching or cleansing?
We have a power that's the opposite of useless- it's an instakill, reliable instant cleanse power. It's the equivalent of complaining that the one-hit kill and noclip cheat codes just aren't OP enough.
They aren't. Witches and magical girls aren't our real enemies. Our ability to kill them and cleanse Soul Gems doesnot advance us toward our goals at all. So, they cannot be OP.
We'd be better off furthering the plot by finishing dewitching since that's a win condition while something like bracers of +5 convenience or "lol everyone around us in our range also has temporary griefhax" don't really change much in the larger scheme of things.
Yeah, no, even then it's more useful to try and get nowhere with dewitching theories than it is to do more gimmicks. Nothing that's been suggested in these past few pages actually gives us all that much of an advantage or does anything positive. Like...griefhax for everyone? That's basically just having the same thing happen as our current powerset since it'd be limited by our range anyway.
I suspect that the "you can make anything out of grief" is there to appeal to SV's instinctive love of shiny as much as anything- since Firn's been very careful not to make it gamebreaking or give us truly special things or permanent changes we couldn't achieve normally. Remember the enchantment bracer and how that went?
Firn has told us that our powers are useful and powerful and that he needs this to be so as he needs to stack the deck in opur favour. That implies that wining without them is completely impossible.
If we can turn seeds into gems? If we ever get to that point? We've effectively defused Kyubey's biggest revelation and basically become capable of bringing megucas back from death. In a vacuum, is that enough? Maybe not, but it wouldn't be in a vacuum. It'd be part of our general efforts to improve matters.
It IS a win condition. It just might not be the only one.
No. You're ignoring Kyuubey's response. And he will have one.
Possibility one: He immediately kills us, which could encourage a Madoka contract or Homura witchout (or both)
Possibility two: He let's us live. This is possibly worse. Because he then steals every single grief seed on the planet to keep them out of our grasp. He also steals every grief seed that drops from a witch before the meguca can fetch it. This means that every meguca on Earth lasts a few days before permanent witching (as we can't get the grief seeds) and the witch population skyrockets, causing massive disasters everywhere. To keep up his meguca population, he begins contracting even faster, which he can as the massive disasters makes getting wishes more easily. This putsway more pressure on Madoka herself to contract and realising this, and that we are threatening to render this planet unprofitable, he decides to squeeze everything he can get out of it and contract even those he normally wouldn't, especially as it encourages a Madoka contract. By itself, this causes apocalypse and basically achieves none of our goals.
Kyubey wants to witch megucas out. The witchbomb is what breaks a lot of gucas- the fact that it's an inevitable, horrible, crushing thing and that all you've ever done is going to be horribly inverted. There's no way out from that. Bonus points for needing to kill some of your former friends afterwards with just enough left of them to recognize.
A success here means none of that applies. It'd mean Kyoko's mindset about Oktavia was RIGHT and would result in a good end rather than "well that failed".
What's more, the Witch system is at the heart of Madoka contracting in the final timeline- it's fundamentally unfair and horrible and self-sustaining. Changing that is how we break the whole system.
On a more personal level, it makes Tetris from "we're dead" to something Mami might survive. It means Madoka's less likely to contract to fix things.
So yeah, I'm putting this as one of the most important things we could and should be doing.
Like, with our current powerset if we got dewitching tomorrow, we could start working on implementing the Sabrina cleansing program en-masse while quietly making sure no more seeds end up in Kyubey's paws. And start reverting witches one at a time. Our abilities mean such details as "magic consumption" and "seed reliance" are kinda academic.
We'd be working on cleansing and social links too alongside this anyway. I really don't understand how you can think reverting witches is a bad thing in any way. We laugh at the idea of seed scarcity and competition, remember?
Look we can say "yes we do", "no we don't" all day, but I'm not going to change my mind and I can't understand why you'd think it's arguable that a girl whose whole thing is breaking the system breaking the most horrible and irreversible part of that system in a way that saves countless lives isn't a win condition.
I am saying that I want to focus on the goal that matters. Directly. You can call it a guess or a theory but at the end of the day the enchantment is directly relevant to what we want while the rest...I can't see how it helps at all.
Enchantment is directly related to trying dewitching. Until a better approach comes along, I think it's a better use of science time than "random bracers we know are contaminated by grief" or "try giving everyone in our vicinity griefcleansing when it's our own personal magic and even if it worked nothing much would change because it'd be limited to 100m as though only we had it".
tl;dr: Until we get a better approach that makes sense- and we don't have that yet- enchantment is the best way to do dewitching that is the best way to do science.
Not in the slightest because it's saving lives. Full stop. Anything else is window dressing to that fact. Seriously. It really is that simple to me. Witch saving saves lives and stops the cast from being broken by the finality of it. We ignore any issues with population control due to our very nature.
I can't see any plausible scenarios where dewitching is a bad thing.
Guys Ugo is right how is SCIENCE going to help us right now ? We need to further our knowledge of dewitching because this how we are breaking the system, and we need to make our power reach everyone by making our range large to make us always able to save everyone. SCIENCE will help later but first we need those things for Mami and all around us. I do agree that SCIENCE is nice but there is a time and place right now we need to further our primary goals.
Edit: Sorry about bad english, just hurt my foot, hands trembling a bit sorry if it is kind of confusing
And i find kind of silly how everyone is saying that Kyubey is going to nuke us at the first sight we figure out dewitching, he is only going to do this kind of thing if did find a way to reach all MG in japan. We just need to remain small, while doing our esperiments till we are ready to kick him to hell
We are not going to travel the world of Meguka dewitching everyone! This is just the first step to break the system in my opinion, the second being making our range large and going up from there with SCIENCE
**To get QBs off the planet, we'd have to convince them they don't need to use humanity to defeat Entropy. (Heck, to really save everyone we'd need to obtain and dewitch all the grief seeds on the QB planet) Or at least, find a way to obtain energy from us that doesn't involve screwing with our souls and putting us into a state of eternal despair.
And on the topic of dewitching... while I don't think that it's victory in and of itself, I do agree with Ugo. We can't possibly know how things'll turn out - but I refuse to believe that trying to help people is wrong. It might be a mistake, we might not find what we really wanted... but it's not wrong. We'll do everything we can for them - if that's bring them back to life, good. If all we can do for them is end their suffering...then I suppose we'd do that too. If it turns out that they witch out again repeatedly, then we aren't going to keep bringing them back to witch them out over and over again. (though I think that it might not be the case for megucas who witch'd out by simply running out of steam in battle rather then falling into emotional despair).
Is it hypocritical? Sure. In the first place, something like "saving everyone" is a very difficult goal when people inherently are going to fight each other. But even so... Emiya Syndrome, remember?
On the topic of science, however, I think that expanding our options is a good idea. You never really know what we might need. On that note - we can make technology that we quite understand with grief. Could we try making some sort of Portal device or teleporter? That'd allow us to help a lot more people much more easily. Just let them know that we'll be in area X at 8:00 PM, and that we'll cleanse all the grief in a 100m radius of that area. They show up at the cleansing time with their grief seeds, we cleanse, and port to the next area. It's also possible that we could use it to extend our range by artifically "shortening" the distance between Sabrina and, say, the stop sign that's 101m away from her.
I never understood that. Shirou's brokeness is something everyine should emulate, IMO. Valuing every single other person more than your own life? That's a good thing.
Step 1: Figure out Enchantment. We need to master this one way or another anyway, so we can do effects that last outside our range.
Step 2: Figure out Dewitching. Perform it once.
Step 3: We now have Dewitched Meguca A. I'll call her Majoko. Keep Majoko as an ethical testing subject and as a psychiatric patient. Solve her traumas best we can. Gather any scientific data we can from the process for the sake of minimizing trauma and maximizing livelihood and longterm happiness.
Step 4: See if we can create Grief Cubes or other artificial means of cleansing. At this stage, we might research Barriers and/or Familiars, who knows.
Step 5: If Step 4 isn't working out, try and minimize the Grief Seeds in circulation and turn them into Clear Seeds. if nothing else, it'll be much more manageable as a stopgap status quo.
Step 6: Seriously figure out how to cleanse everyone forever. Clara Doll Sabrinas all over the place?
Step 7: Start dewitching and rehabilitating Meguca back into society. The Masquarade is fucked. Deal with that bullshit.
Step 8: If Kyubey hasn't shown his hand yet, he will now. Try to diplomacy for his stock of Grief Seeds so we can finish saving all Meguca forever. If he's gonna be a dick (and he totally will, but might as well try the civil route if we've gotten this powerful), proceed to Step 9.
Step 9: Destroy the Incubators forever.
Step 10: Do to all other worlds what we've done for Earth.
Step 11: Figure out how to turn grief into lifespan for the Universe. Solve Entropy.
Step 12: Hug Mumi for the rest of eternity in the most literal of senses.
There, a simple 12-step program! At that point we can move on to the next phases of our utopia, where we fix Gemshattering and ultimately undo death for every living being who's ever existed in every timeline and hypothetical universe! Also, figuring out how to pull a Rochelle and performing our own Contracts might be nice.
I think we can all agree on this course of action, so please everybody knock it off.
One is inherent, wish-based magic that comes to them as naturally as the emotions that spawned them in the first place.
The other is a practiced, more rational-minded skill that is difficult to pick up and requires curmudgeoning your magic to do shit it wasn't originally attended to do, to the point that being naturally good at enchantment makes the Meguca in question (like Mami) famous among their own kind.
There is absolutely no reason for Sayaka learning enchantment and other esoteric skills to even be on the table until she masters her natural powerset and we become adept enough at it that we can help her in any meaningful way besides being an infinite MP battery.
Just a random thought:
If we can turn a witch back into a magical girl again and this girl then witches out again, would her second witching still reduce entropy?
Just a random thought:
If we can turn a witch back into a magical girl again and this girl then witches out again, would her second witching still reduce entropy?
Yes. By all indications, Kyubey gains energy through the following: The initial contract, the witching event, and all grief collected via Grief Seeds/Cubes.
There are currently 31 named Magical Girls in the story still living, unless they died off-screen (Cast list + Kyouko and the chibi + our friends + Sabrina).
I know it's besides the point here, but reminder about other megucas existing somewhere in this setting we know about:
Another girl who used to live in Sendai, though we don't know her whereabouts:
Chouko shakes her head, before stopping. "Well, there's-what's-her name, the blonde girl? But I haven't seen her for... a month? Anyone else seen her recently?" she glances around, recieving only shaken heads from her friends. "Then no, we're the only ones still... hanging on. She probably had the sense to get out," she adds, a bitter tone in her voice.
"Hmm," Homura says noncommitally. "The Fukushima girls... they won't be sending everyone. Akiyama Atsuko, Koizumi Sasami, Nishimura Moe." She pauses for a moment, before adding.
Sereg we want dewitching to soft the blow on Mami when it drops on her, the subject about going around dewitching all seeds we see, is going to be delayed till we have another method of cleasing in large scale(hypotethical grief cubes). Our sight right are now in training Enchanting, because we suspect that will help in all our skills including dewitching (besides building up Mami confidence). The girl we dewitch will serve as a test to see her emotional state, and how to treat her to get better. After we do ll this i am fine with continuing all other SCIENCE projects.
I know it's besides the point here, but reminder about other megucas existing somewhere in this setting we know about:
Another girl who used to live in Sendai, though we don't know her whereabouts:
There's other Tokyo Groups.
Somehow, I got it in my head that there's a lot of megucas in Tokyo?
Also, don't know where I got the idea, but I think there's seven Fukushima girls... Really don't know where I got that from.
There are even more. There are confirmed magical girl groups in Tome, Osaki and Onegawa.
I also thought there were seven Fukushima girls, but I can't find any conformation.
I can't believe that the whole Sendai mess started almost a year ago. Time sure goes by fast.
Sereg we want dewitching to soft the blow on Mami when it drops on her, the subject about going around dewitching all seeds we see, is going to be delayed till we have another method of cleasing in large scale(hypotethical grief cubes). Our sight right are now in training Enchanting, because we suspect that will help in all our skills including dewitching (besides building up Mami confidence). The girl we dewitch will serve as a test to see her emotional state, and how to treat her to get better. After we do ll this i am fine with continuing all other SCIENCE projects.
Again, I am not denying that dewitching is important.
I am denying that it is a "win condition". Those are totally different things. Not being completely paralysed is necessary to win a race, but it does not mean that you've already won.
Also, although I never said it in this particular round of discussion, I also deny that enchantment is the guaranteed, only possible method of dewitching. There's far more evidence that using enchantment to dewitch is completely impossible. We're one of the worst enchanters out there and no meguca in the history of the Universe has ever succesfully used enchantment to dewitch even once. The likelihood of it being capable of dewitching is ridiculously remote. Trying to stop doing everything to try using enchantment to dewitch means that we'll likely never achieve a single thing ever again. If we're to dewitch, it's practically guaranteed to be using something we alone can do. eg. Making a grief "dewitcher" (witch we haven't tried yet).
Spending all our time trying to do something which we're not even sure is even possible let alone how to do it when we have pretty good ideas of how to do other useful things is completely unproductive. If anything that's wasting time. Spending more time learning about our powers is likelyto get us far closer to dewitching than endless enchantment practice will (not that enchantment practice isn't a good thing, but we shouldn't treat it as the miracle provider it isn't)
@Firnagzen , question? When it says that her soul is in that bottle shape, do you mean the core of the gem, or the whole thing? How have our grief powers worked with grief extraction so far? Because I have the idea of sticking a leetle teeny pebble into the flow of the gem and watching what happens to it and where it goes. That could be informative.
Because hitting things with a sword is so easy a caveman can do it? The point is to start with the easy stuff. Thinking she'll have more success at easier tasks is so obvious it goes without saying.
There's also an expectation at starting with the easy stuff. You walk before you run. Which means that if we start with enchanting, Sayaka will assume everything after that will be worse.
Again, I am not denying that dewitching is important.
I am denying that it is a "win condition". Those are totally different things. Not being completely paralysed is necessary to win a race, but it does not mean that you've already won.
Also, although I never said it in this particular round of discussion, I also deny that enchantment is the guaranteed, only possible method of dewitching. There's far more evidence that using enchantment to dewitch is completely impossible. We're one of the worst enchanters out there and no meguca in the history of the Universe has ever succesfully used enchantment to dewitch even once. The likelihood of it being capable of dewitching is ridiculously remote. Trying to stop doing everything to try using enchantment to dewitch means that we'll likely never achieve a single thing ever again. If we're to dewitch, it's practically guaranteed to be using something we alone can do. eg. Making a grief "dewitcher" (witch we haven't tried yet).
Spending all our time trying to do something which we're not even sure is even possible let alone how to do it when we have pretty good ideas of how to do other useful things is completely unproductive. If anything that's wasting time. Spending more time learning about our powers is likelyto get us far closer to dewitching than endless enchantment practice will (not that enchantment practice isn't a good thing, but we shouldn't treat it as the miracle provider it isn't)
I understand, but we have been esperimenting with our power all the time, and we always find a dead end, or its too much limited. By trying enchanting we can see if it can improve our limits, or not at all, then we can go back to our griefhax, after all this will become our only way of advancing the plot if enchanting fail us
Edit: Enchanting alone in my opinion too will not help at all, by using enchanting along side our griefhax that i can see our powers growing, and lot of doors opening to us
Also given Sayaka's insecure and uncertain and even when hyper is basically putting up a front- and her spirals are caused by regretting her wish and she has more than enough reasons to do that? You could argue that setting her up to fail is actively dangerous to her.
And then we're her to reassure her. You can go around thing you can't do much about it.
You can't let this kind of feeling fester. Failure is a possibility on itself, in pretty much everything. Denying her the chance to fail and learn from her mistakes is what will also doom her, especially if we're not there to tell her what we wrong and things happen.
And then we're her to reassure her. You can go around thing you can't do much about it.
You can't let this kind of feeling fester. Failure is a possibility on itself, in pretty much everything. Denying her the chance to fail and learn from her mistakes is what will also doom her, especially if we're not there to tell her what we wrong and things happen.
I understand, but we have been esperimenting with our power all the time, and we always find a dead end, or its too much limited. By trying enchanting we can see if it can improve our limits, or not at all, then we can go back to our griefhax, after all this will become our only way of advancing the plot if enchanting fail us
Edit: Enchanting alone in my opinion too will not help at all, by using enchanting along side our griefhax that i can see our powers growing, and lot of doors opening to us
There's plenty we haven't tried yet and we barely have any idea what we're even doing with enchantment. What's more, some of our experiments could make enchantment progress better.
([?] Create ring of shared experience. Ask Mami to wear its partner and have her enchant something so that we copy her enchantment skills)
Plus, not everything has led to these dead ends and we've been inneficient in our testing. I'm suggesting greater efficiency.
How would you try to give her confidence as a meguca and a person while advoiding the fact she eventually will have to taste what failure (and learn from it) is?
Honest question and without intention to be aggresive.
There's plenty we haven't tried yet and we barely have any idea what we're even doing with enchantment. What's more, some of our experiments could make enchantment progress better.
([?] Create ring of shared experience. Ask Mami to wear its partner and have her enchant something so that we copy her enchantment skills)
Plus, not everything has led to these dead ends and we've been inneficient in our testing. I'm suggesting greater efficiency.
How would you try to give her confidence as a meguca and a person while advoiding the fact she eventually will have to taste what failure (and learn from it) is?
Honest question and without intention to be aggresive.
Begin small, like forming weapons, training her natural born abilities, how to parkour around the city, how to heal, little things that she will train along side us, then when she feels confident enough we will include her in our study about enchanting(if the ring Sereg says works it will help her a lot too!)
I generally agree with you in this discussion, and believe that implementing a cleansing network has to happen before we begin implementing any sort of dewitching. (Not commenting on the priority of research, but the order of implementation seems clear cut to me.)
That said, given that we have no idea how to dewitch, with current studies on enchantment being based on just a hunch, shouldn't we go talk to the people who actually pulled it off? For all we know, the Asunaro crew did use enchantment to successfully dewitch.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, go... to... Asunaro?
I generally agree with you in this discussion, and believe that implementing a cleansing network has to happen before we begin implementing any sort of dewitching. (Not commenting on the priority of research, but the order of implementation seems clear cut to me.)
That said, given that we have no idea how to dewitch, with current studies on enchantment being based on just a hunch, shouldn't we go talk to the people who actually pulled it off? For all we know, the Asunaro crew did use enchantment to successfully dewitch.
So, I guess what I'm saying is, go... to... Asunaro?
In all seriousness, though, just because PMKM was a terrible story doesn't mean Asunaro as written by a competent author is a bad place to go. Given that that group was working on mass grief cleansing and dewitching to stupendous amounts of success considering they lacked our abilities, and that a lot of the stupidity of the series can be credited to the slow motion grief spiral a lot of those girls went through, which we can help with, going to Asunaro is pretty much compulsory if we want to make a serious effort at our current goals.
