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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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Higure said:
I guess that was kind of obvious, huh?

Reason it matters is because, if all they need to live is Magic, then that eliminates much of their dependency on mundane civilization, which changes the power dynamic substantially.

Whether that's good or bad is something that people would probably argue over, but it does tip the scales in the favor of Puella Magi.

It also greatly reduces the value of a mundane education (in terms of career opportunities).
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You're looking at this wrongly. While MGs can technically survive without food (provided they have Clear Seeds), many of them are already coping with the fact that their souls have been removed from their bodies and placed into gems, and thus a feeling of not being human anymore. Having them go without eating would be highly detrimental to their mental well-being, which is a FAR greater concern than figuring out where to get the money for food.

I mean, technically, MGs can survive just fine sleeping on the ground out in the cold, but that doesn't mean it's even remotely a good idea for MGs to go homeless to save money.

[X] Redshirt Army
 
Firnagzen said:
Making no comment on the rest of your post other than the fact that I enjoy it when people theorise about my work - she isn't, actually. Mami has a very distinct voice in my head, and it's not mine. All of the main characters do, really.
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So clearly you live vicariously though one of the side characters. And there is only one side character that truly fits the bill: Kyousuke.

This entire quest is just an allegory for Firn's obsession with music. The final battle with Feathers is just going to be a Fiddle-Off where all the quest participants have to manually map out each draw of the bow.
 
AuraTwilight said:
On the topic of Oriko not being able to control her body with a spine injury, do note that Oriko wasn't very experienced with her magic at that point. She had never even attempted enchantment, and had never been in a fight or had to magically fuck with her body; her precognition pretty much totally consumes her magic usage due to how taxing it is.
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I was musing about this at work, and trying to recall if there were any instances of a meguca still being able to control a limb after it had been severed, and I remembered Masami. She was a fairly experienced magical girl, and she got cut nearly in half and apparently was in that state for quite some time. If anybody could figure out how to do so, you'd think that it would be her. But it seems that she was only able to keep herself together and move her lower body by using her telekinesis. That would seem to indicate that spinal cords actually do still matter for meguca. They can't actually die of the things that a human dies of (brain damage due to oxygen deprivation) because their brain functions have been moved to the soul gem, but their bodies can be so badly damaged that they're unable to operate them.
 
BlackoutSampler said:
So clearly you live vicariously though one of the side characters. And there is only one side character that truly fits the bill: Kyousuke.

This entire quest is just an allegory for Firn's obsession with music. The final battle with Feathers is just going to be a Fiddle-Off where all the quest participants have to manually map out each draw of the bow.
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Actually Kyuubey is the final enemy and the Fiddle-Off is to the tune of "The Devil went down to Georgia".
 
Onmur said:
As far as 'natural' magics... we actually got some to pick from!

Our Wish magic is Grief Control... which we really need to sit down and try to enchant, but without assists like we tried earlier. If it doesn't work... and the Ribbon channeling doesn't work either, we might not be able to have Grief Control happen outside our radius, ever.

Well, besides our Wish magic, we've got other natural magics we could try to enchant, that being Multitasking magic and Magic Sense magic.

While managing to make Grief Control enchantments would be great, any successful enchantment should be a good first step, and make it easier to practice other kinds of enchantment later.
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Honestly, we should try making dangersense, clairvoyance, multitasking, forcefield-projecting, and teleportation enchanted objects out of Grief--we'll definitely want all of that for Walpurgisnacht, at the very least, so we need to practice that ahead of time. And since it's stuff we'd carry solely on our person anyway, there's no disadvantage to them being Grief constructs (allowing us to just cheat).

*Note that, by teleportation, I mean a teleportation that only works within our 100-meter range. In other words, we can only use it to teleport somewhere 100 meters away from our current position. Similarly, the clairvoyance would only grant us clairvoyance of stuff within 100 meters of us. I don't know if the dangersense enchantment would warn us of threats beyond 100 meters, but even that much would be useful.
 
If we can make non-actively-witchy invisible grief by locking nanoparticulates of it smaller than the wavelength of light in place, I'd like to see us just constantly keep a shell of that around our soul gem.

Might be worth testing it against Mami's muskets first to see how effective a defense it actually is, first, though.

Also, if we can keep it flowing outside of lungs properly, we could probably make a mean utility fog that way.
 
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The Phoenixian said:
So I am epiphany tripping hard, I have to leave very soon, and I have no time for proper responses to everything else in the thread. Even so, I want to get this out.

So here's the epiphany:

There have been a number of Brina theorys: Walpurgis!Brina, Kyuu!Brina, I think there may be a Clara!Brina around too somewhere.

Well, simply brute force theorizing suggests that we should eventually look to Wraith!Brina.

And on inspection... it kind of checks out.

Here's the start of the thought: There are four states of matter: Solid, Liquid, Gas, Plasma. From most to least dense (+ however you fit plasma in that.) We've tried grief in two of these.

There are also four kinds of wraiths. Each kind of wraith is named for a level of enlightenment, and has an attack or effect corresponding to an age of the universe: The smallest wraiths use lasers, bright light, corresponding to the beginning --- "let there be light" and all that; the second, Shugen Wraiths, are associated with fire, and thus the hot early period; the third, Satori wraiths, induce corrosion, which the corresponds to the universe ruled by the decay of entropy; the last, Moksha wraiths, are freezing cold, associated with the final end.

When we use grief, it becomes witchy when we do something, even natural forces. Making magnetism is witchy. Making gravity is witchy. This is very frequently noted.

However, when gaseous grief corrodes matter, it's not especially more witchy than normal gas. It even does it on it's own. Now you could associate that corrosion with "Well, it's grief, it's despair, of course it does that." And on it's own this is entirely reasonable.

But then we go to luce prima: During the experiments that led to luce prima, making light from solid grief is never noted to be especially witchy. (at least from my view on the thread, and I'm using a pretty quick ctrl+f for "witch") Despite that, it works, and it works well enough to melt an engine block. There's no mention of a "twist" or anything the first time we make light, we just do it very... naturally using a single grief sphere. All this despite melting a car's engine block on our first go. We can even feel the nature and qualities of the light source/laser beam as it emerge from the grief quite naturally. (The page and first of the posts I'm looking at, for reference.)

Interestingly, luce prima isn't even our suggestion: It's Mami's and from what I've seen Mami is often Firn's voice. (Which would also suggest we name the resulting state of grief attacks Fiamma secondo, Decadenza terzo, Ghiaccio/Congelare Ultimo, <second flame, third decay, final ice> after just taking a quick look at google translate.)


There's more that than though. When a wraith pulls from a soul gem or person, it's accompanying image is akin to stream or a river of grief. Just like we're described as doing it. More than that, wraiths bind grief into a "safe" state, mixing the memories, magic, and grief they acquire to create grief cubes. We've never bound grief with magic (or memories) but we do keep it in safe state within our presence.

It even fits with the creation of clear seeds: Wraiths drain soul gems, leaving nothingness. We drain grief seeds in a similar way, leaving only the absolute core.

Of course this raises a question: Aren't wraiths emotionless old men/modern art? Yes, but they can and do gain emotion, and the more emotion they gain, the more human they become. The Moksha wraith of Wraith Arc, the very strongest wraith was filled with the memories and emotions of a world... and it ceased to be a wraith at all. In that case, it absorbed the witch of a universe and became one itself. Wraith!Madoka might also count, being a very small wraith filled with the emotions of one girl, and becoming the physical embodiment of her love, the Clara Doll Ai.

In our, hypothetical, case? It came into possession of a living, breathing, healthy world... and became human. But it may not have happened that way. Or it may have. We can't tell.

Wraith!Madoka is also noteworthy that she's even able to talk about the motives of wraiths and make her own decisions.


Which is interesting, because, well... A lot of magic's "karmic consequences" seem to arise through perfectly normal means. Sayaka healing Kyouske and then having Hitomi confront her for his love for instance. Even if Madoka is responsible for their existence in Wraith Arc, the explanation given by them for their actions always struck me as exactly like something an incubator would say. "Prevent energy from building up and causing bad consequences" Very leading, very low on details. Sort of like "Accept a life of battle."

It wouldn't surprise me if Madoka's wish was responsible for them karmically, but the actual physical side of things was due to the incubators after their attempts to create witches failed. (Or just that the incubators took control of that side of the system after it came into existence. Wraith powers and soul absorption is pretty similar to what the Law of Cycles does after all. They even also serve as a dark mirror to the role of defeating witches before they were born via soul absorption.)

Which, if true, means that the wraiths of a different wish could look very very different.


That said, the possibility that wraiths are generally similar would well also explain the oddity of our soul, and it being like something Kyuubey never encountered before. The soul of an emotional wraith needn't look anything at all like a human or even a witch: It's channeling and being absorbed by emotions that aren't truly even it's own to begin with. Of course it would look massively different! (Which, you know, also looks a lot like Sabrina growing from the thread's discussion and decisions and absorbing that into her psyche. It started off as something handed to her, but became more and more her own the more she dealt with it.)

That also ties into witches in two ways: Wraiths cannot absorb witches without being consumed by them. Same with us: We talk to a witch directly, we fall to it. But the the whole humanized!Wraith thing even fits our particular witch: Our witch is Dedolere: An end to grief. Wraiths are associated with Buddhism, which seeks to move beyond suffering. Wraiths are also associated with the progression of the universe, which, IIRC, our witch's stopping grief/magic (whichever it was) would allow.


It doesn't answer everything: "Why are we approximately European?" for one. There could be much more to us than just that. Even so, it certainly seems to fit our powers and possibly much of our nature.

And because of it links to the fundamental material states of our grief power this is testable: If wraiths correspond to grief "density", plasmatic grief should freeze things that are exposed to it, and fluid grief should ignite things. (it could be the other way around and still work, of course, but if it's this way then it's very solid evidence.)

Likewise, we may be able to enchant grief to create a grief-cube from magic+grief stabilizing each other. (Not really evidence, except circumstantially, and I wouldn't call it enough besides what I've reviewed here unless it comes very naturally.)

Well, there's my thoughts... and now... I should go.
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Very interesting, but there's one flaw: there are more than four states of matter. There are lots, actually. It gets pretty wonky.
 
next time we meet a new meguca we need to have part of our Grief form "menacing" kanji to float off of us as we approach... maybe when we meet Michiru tomorrow.
 
The Narrator said:
I was musing about this at work, and trying to recall if there were any instances of a meguca still being able to control a limb after it had been severed, and I remembered Masami. She was a fairly experienced magical girl, and she got cut nearly in half and apparently was in that state for quite some time. If anybody could figure out how to do so, you'd think that it would be her. But it seems that she was only able to keep herself together and move her lower body by using her telekinesis. That would seem to indicate that spinal cords actually do still matter for meguca. They can't actually die of the things that a human dies of (brain damage due to oxygen deprivation) because their brain functions have been moved to the soul gem, but their bodies can be so badly damaged that they're unable to operate them.
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Narrator, there's a difference between a broken spine and an entire limb that's simply not attached to a body anymore. Even if the spine was severed, Oriko wasn't bisected like Masami was.

Also, Meguca are supposed to be able to regenerate from anything provided that they can pay for it in grief costs, and Masami's refusal to regenerate in lieu of telekinetic bandaging was...statistically anomalous.
 
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