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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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TheFanficAddict said:
Okay.

This? This I did not know. Wow....

And Agreed. We...we're not here to conform to despair and nihlism.

Sabrina's here to make it better. Better for all the people around her, all the people that she can.

System Breaker for a reason.
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Amen. Nobody says it is easy. Nobody says it must work.
But I am convinced it can work.Here and in the real world.
If people just keep trying. Despite the obvious difficulties. Despite victory not being assured.
Mankind is better than 'the best solution is nirvana, because pain, ignorance and EVIL will always win".
 
SolipsistSerpent said:
If reassuring Madoka is needed, wouldn't placing Sabrina's hand on hers supply physical contact without her feeling she's getting special treatment out of perceived weakness?
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Appreciated, but it's not really relevant to the greater problem, and not possible right now, anyway. I've actually laid out the seating order (and it's a round table): Sabrina-Mami-Homura-Madoka-Nadia-Sayaka-Sabrina.
 
[X] The Narrator

The foreigner probably needs a moment to think about who she could even ask anyways, and if we know who would be willing to nearly throw their lives always before knowing about the Clear Seeds/Grief Safety Net we would know who of the recruits to keep an eye out for. Both to find the ones who are the most idealistic and the ones who we might need to talk with.

... That came out wrong, I just agreed we should not be playing the hard guy here. :sad:

EDIT: Changed vote.
 
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Firnagzen said:
Appreciated, but it's not really relevant to the greater problem, and not possible right now, anyway. I've actually laid out the seating order (and it's a round table): Sabrina-Mami-Homura-Madoka-Nadia-Sayaka-Sabrina.
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Well... That makes a slightly bigger deal out of it, but it's not impossible any more than hugging her is, it just now involves either getting up or leaning across some people.

But fair enough on the bigger issues.
 
I am one of the Non-Discord members and someone who managed to miss Madoka's horrified reaction until it was pointed out.

I asked and it was explained to me in this thread sufficiently enough to convince me.

We should hug Madoka.

If you want to know the thought processes behind why people who use discord vote certain ways, why not ask them?
 
I can absolutely only speak for myself in this. I don't vote, I don't debate (edit: regularly). (not because I was scared off, but because I'm reading the quest like a story.) And I love the waff as much as anyone.

That said, I think it is very important to remember that Madoka did not save the world by being nice. Madoka did not save the world by being in love with Homura, by being a good person, by listening to others' concerns. She's very good at that, yes, but if you think that's all she is you're selling her short for some sort of fandom ideal.

It's important to keep in mind that Madoka saved the world by being blazingly, incandescently smart and strategic. Anyone can sacrifice themselves. I'm sorry, but that's literally Sayaka's arc; ideals without strategy or intelligence just break against the world; there's an intelligent adversary that profits when you break.

Madoka's wish is a marvel of self-referentiality. It keeps her intelligence in the loop to bypass any chance to become a source of despair by misunderstanding; it closes over its own negative consequence in a stunningly simple way. Every word in it is important. It defeats in one stroke a race of machiavellian intelligences that have had millenia to learn the game, not by overpowering them and stuffing them full of grief as a lesser person may have done, but by removing the structural cause for conflict.

(Madoka Kaname, I remind you, is a 14 year old girl. What do they put in the water over there...)

Madoka knew that she needed to make things better by the power of her character. Madoka knew how to make things better by the power of her mind.

Neither of those two factions are in the wrong story; both of them deserve to be here; both of them are needed for a good ending.

And don't either of you let the other tell you otherwise.
 
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Welp looks like I'm never sleeping again :V

Not going to bother digging up quotes: Firstly, the demographic A/B characterization of the thread makes me chafe because I don't identify with either group; I only started posting here a bit over a year ago, and I regularly got into unfortunate entanglements with at least one "group A" person before my extended hiatus, but I find the implication of being lumped in with group B massively insulting, because I've never proposed anything that was grossly out of character-- the whole reason I made an account on this website was to try to help people spot things they might have overlooked (and provide insight into Asunaro; being a deranged mutant that not only didn't mind PMKM but actually liked it enough to read it more than once sort of de facto makes me an expert?)

So it's probably best just to drop generalizing large segments of the thread population, as it does nothing but continue fostering divisiveness in the thread.

As for the thread atmosphere and voting process on the whole: I think it's been fairly well covered while I've been asleep, but I think the biggest problem here is shadowrunning. As I said a few pages back, I really don't think we need a six-line vote just to say "yes", but people dissect minutia for 20 pages, create these massive Machiavellian vote blocks, and descend into ideological trench warfare because people are paranoid that every word and every errant tic aren't only important, but matters of life and death.

Like, the stakes people are perceiving here for whether or not we hug Madoka now or hug Madoka within the next 5 minutes are literally bad ending the entire quest because we might tip her emotional scales too far in either direction and cause her to make a wish and ruin everything everywhere forever.

The other biggest problem is the massive time dilation between the thread and the story, which results in us pre-planning and debating things before they're relevant, then having to have the same debate over and over again because by the time it is relevant months have passed, everyone's forgotten, and the thread is too bloated by arguments and shitfunposting for anyone to bother going back and digging up the salient points.

ed: for clarity, as I'm still making general statements
 
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FeepingCreature said:
I can absolutely only speak for myself in this. I don't vote, I don't debate. (not because I was scared off, but because I'm reading the quest like a story.) And I love the waff as much as anyone.

That said, I think it is very important to remember that Madoka did not save the world by being nice. Madoka did not save the world by being in love with Homura, by being a good person, by listening to others' concerns. She's very good at that, yes, but if you think that's all she is you're selling her short for some sort of fandom ideal.

It's important to keep in mind that Madoka saved the world by being blazingly, incandescently smart and strategic. Anyone can sacrifice themselves. I'm sorry, but that's literally Sayaka's arc; ideals without strategy or intelligence just break against the world; there's an intelligent adversary that profits when you break.

Madoka's wish is a marvel of self-referentiality. It keeps her intelligence in the loop to bypass any chance to become a source of despair by misunderstanding; it closes over its own negative consequence in a stunningly simple way. Every word in it is important. It defeats in one stroke a race of machiavellian intelligences that have had millenia to learn the game, not by overpowering them and stuffing them full of grief as a lesser person may have done, but by removing the structural cause for conflict.

(Madoka Kaname, I remind you, is a 14 year old girl. What do they put in the water over there...)

Madoka knew that she needed to make things better by the power of her character. Madoka knew how to make things better by the power of her mind.

Neither of those two factions are in the wrong story; both of them deserve to be here; both of them are needed for a good ending.

And don't either of you let the other tell you otherwise.
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Okay, I agree with the spirit of this, but not with the overall statement.

Did Madoka really save the world?

She made it better, absolutely. But she didn't save it, just made it less painful.

Think about it: Nothing truly changed about the system. It became less shitty. Young girls are still tricked into making wishes for things they don't actually need or desire. They still have to fight against terrifying evils. Territories are still mapped out, defended fiercely, and almost certainly some people feel forced into a situation where they have to farm for grief cubes. All the problems that caused people to suffer still exist.

The ONLY aspect that got changed is that, when someone suffers too much, they're able to be rescued before they become something horrifying. But that shit is the end result of the system. It doesn't remove the reasons WHY girls witched out in the first place. Madokas wish WAS well thought out. It was hard for the incubators to abuse, and it did help to make things at least a little better. But ultimately, I feel, it's solace without solving anything. Even if the ending is happier, those girls still experience a tragedy. The final result is like the moral of a Hans Christien Andersen novel: Lifes a shit, but at least you die and go to heaven.

Madokas wish was one made by a fairly intelligent middle schools girl who'd been subjected to incredible emotional torment over the course of a month reaching her limit and feeling she had to do something, anything at all. It was a well made wish, and one that helped out a lot of people, but only after the fact. It's one of the reasons that, while I love the universe, Im not really the biggest fan of the shows overall plot. For a number of other reasons, but thats neither here nor there.
 
Firnagzen said:
The exact manner that this takes place in, I'm mulling over: I kind of like the idea of fixed time slots.
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My two cents: I quite like how Sabrina's life feels like a proper life. Any system with video game rigidity would detract from that. And, well, wouldn't making time scarcer make people care even more about how it's spent? Just look at yesterday. We had a compromise between science and social by sciencing with Mami until Sayaka showed up for practice. If that kind of thing isn't possible, the odds of an argument go up even more, right?

The ideal should be either the voters or Sabrina herself being able to go farther on fewer votes. Maybe block the time out ourselves, like "okay, we're doing science for the next two hours, here's the experiment list, knock out however many fit in that amount of time". Or make the votes go longer. Like, so far this conversation we're having now could've been handled with one vote if you'd asked at the start "what does Sabrina hope to accomplish in this meeting" and run with the answer. That would mostly just require you asking questions instead of calling for any vote at all and hoping.
 
@Vebyast , I feel like you're being uncharitable to @TheEyes and @The Narrator .

You basically call out their position as emblematic of the "hard men making hard decisions" crowd, but that's an absurd overreaction - from what I've read, they both care to a great extent about keeping Sabrina's friends happy and healthy.

Of course they do - they chose to join the thread after quote-unquote Faction A determined Sabrina's general approach and mannerisms, including how she interacts with Madoka and everyone else.

This was quite literally a choice between "hug her now" or "hug her later", and while those in support of "hugging her later" may have made a questionable decision that you can discuss with them, using that to make them out to be some faceless unfeeling 'other' mass is, quite frankly, a large part of the issue here.

In short, you are demonstrating an attitude that is part of the problem.
 
universalperson said:
Ehhhhh...you kinda can when you back up your ideals with superior firepower.

Well, not firepower exactly. I'm not sure what to call what Sabrina has. But it gets people listening.
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To an extent, yes. But not all problems can be solved by the elimination of scarcity. It's a big stick, to be sure, and it's an incredibly powerful tool that does, in fact, break the system... but it's still a big hammer, yannow? Not every problem is a nail.

The point is that you have to be strategic about how you idealist at things - just "being an idealist" isn't the end of the road.
 
universalperson said:
Ehhhhh...you kinda can when you back up your ideals with superior firepower.

Well, not firepower exactly. I'm not sure what to call what Sabrina has. But it gets people listening.
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Yeah, except thats a shitty move. It's basically might makes right, in all caps, underlined three times in red marker.

What Sabrina has is...I guess Charisma? The ability to get people to genuinely think "You know what, maybe this could work". We're not forcing our ideals on others, we're trying, hopefully, to get encourage other people to truly believe in them, or at least think that it's not completely stupid. We CAN fight back, but thats a last resort. And remember, superior strength doesn't mean shit if someone has the right ability to subvert it (If you want examples, theres a ton in JoJos bizarre adventure).

We work by trying to remove the stressors that force magical girls into the 'Hard Girls making Harder Decisions' mindset, I.e. Grief. Our power isn't just to be stronger, but to remove the cause so the effect is negligible.

In short, it's different from superior firepower.

linkhyrule5 said:
To an extent, yes. But not all problems can be solved by the elimination of scarcity. It's a big stick, to be sure, and it's an incredibly powerful tool that does, in fact, break the system... but it's still a big hammer, yannow? Not every problem is a nail.

The point is that you have to be strategic about how you idealist at things - just "being an idealist" isn't the end of the road.
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This.
 
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The3rdCorinthian said:
Yeah, except thats a shitty move. It's basically might makes right, in all caps, underlined three times in red marker.

What Sabrina has is...I guess Charisma? The ability to get people to genuinely think "You know what, maybe this could work". We're not forcing our ideals on others, we're trying, hopefully, to get encourage other people to truly believe in them, or at least think that it's not completely stupid. We CAN fight back, but thats a last resort. And remember, superior strength doesn't mean shit if someone has the right ability to subvert it (If you want examples, theres a ton in JoJos bizarre adventure).

We work by trying to remove the stressors that force magical girls into the 'Hard Girls making Harder Decisions' mindset, I.e. Grief. Our power isn't just to be stronger, but to remove the cause so the effect is negligible.

In short, it's different from superior firepower.
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No, I think that's what @universalperson was trying to express/couldn't find the words for, that Sabrina has more than just firepower and the barrel of a gun.

I don't think it's enough, to just breeze through all obstacles, but we've definitely got more than that.
 
[:D] Thagguy

On the one hand, we get to hug Mami, and Madoka gets a Homu-hug.

On the other... I got nothing.
 
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FeepingCreature said:
I can absolutely only speak for myself in this. I don't vote, I don't debate. (not because I was scared off, but because I'm reading the quest like a story.) And I love the waff as much as anyone.

That said, I think it is very important to remember that Madoka did not save the world by being nice. Madoka did not save the world by being in love with Homura, by being a good person, by listening to others' concerns. She's very good at that, yes, but if you think that's all she is you're selling her short for some sort of fandom ideal.

It's important to keep in mind that Madoka saved the world by being blazingly, incandescently smart and strategic. Anyone can sacrifice themselves. I'm sorry, but that's literally Sayaka's arc; ideals without strategy or intelligence just break against the world; there's an intelligent adversary that profits when you break.

Madoka's wish is a marvel of self-referentiality. It keeps her intelligence in the loop to bypass any chance to become a source of despair by misunderstanding; it closes over its own negative consequence in a stunningly simple way. Every word in it is important. It defeats in one stroke a race of machiavellian intelligences that have had millenia to learn the game, not by overpowering them and stuffing them full of grief as a lesser person may have done, but by removing the structural cause for conflict.

(Madoka Kaname, I remind you, is a 14 year old girl. What do they put in the water over there...)

Madoka knew that she needed to make things better by the power of her character. Madoka knew how to make things better by the power of her mind.

Neither of those two factions are in the wrong story; both of them deserve to be here; both of them are needed for a good ending.

And don't either of you let the other tell you otherwise.
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This. So very, very much.

With regards to @The3rdCorinthian's concerns later - consider that Madoka considers the choices the girls made important. What Madoka did was take most of the deceit out of the system. Look at the casual, almost friendly way Homura talks to Kyubey at the end of Episode 12 - do you think she could do that if they were just doing the same old bullshit? More than that, there's no reason to, anymore.

Madoka's wish did more than just give the girls an afterlife. Madoka's wish made their entire story honest; it gave their fight meaning. No longer are they deceived victims of an alien intelligence trying to exploit their suffering purely for their own gain: now they are making a choice, reasonably well-informed, to give up their lives for the sake of a wish, and to fight against a true threat to their friends that's not just caused by previous wishes. If a girl decides that they have something worth dying for... it's not her place to say otherwise.

That's part of what makes that wish a masterpiece. Remember that Madoka could have undone every wish ever made, completely destroyed the system, but chose not to, because the choices every puella ever made were important to her, even the choice to sacrifice themselves.

Especially those.

In short - those lives aren't hers to save. They belong to the magical girls who chose to give them up, not her. All she wants to do is to make sure that they're getting their money's worth - and she did that, gloriously.
 
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linkhyrule5 said:
Madoka's wish made their entire story honest; it gave their lives meaning.
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That seems a little excessive there, pretty sure their lives were important even when they could Witch out. While I'll agree that Madoka made a great wish (That time) I wouldn't say that Magical Girls were pointless before all this.

On a side note, I wonder what the MGs were like at the beginning, before there were Witches to fight.
 
Nictis said:
That seems a little excessive there, pretty sure their lives were important even when they could Witch out. While I'll agree that Madoka made a great wish (That time) I wouldn't say that Magical Girls were pointless before all this.

On a side note, I wonder what the MGs were like at the beginning, before there were Witches to fight.
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Okay, point, I should qualify it by saying "their lives as Magical Girls." -- Or just "gave their fight meaning." Edit.

And honestly? Given Kyubey's "we came when you were in caves" speech, they probably kept the flocks safe, mostly. Until, yes, without a way to purify their magic ran out.
 
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UbeOne said:
They eventually witched out due to grief build-up over time?
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Well, yeah, but what was the first MGs choices? Was she a tribal healer? A Village leader? Someone who began the first dynasty through overwhelming power?

And what about her Grief management? Were the first ones really just like fireworks without any way to refuel?
 
Their lives were not pointless per se, but their purpose was not fully their own. As Kyubey says, the point of a magical girl is to become a witch and pay in horror for the good their wish has done. That's what Madoka broke, that's the system she destroyed. It's not quite that Madoka gave their lives meaning, it's that for the first time the meaning of their lives was in their own hands.

The fraudulent promise that Kyubey made was fulfilled by her sacrifice.

(How's that for Christian allegory: Jesus is God, but God is the Devil, and the Devil is... Judas??)
 
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