Kind of wondering if it'd be best to go take a detour to hunt down a Witch together or something. Sayaka still seems down and probably won't enjoy karaoke or whatever else is next at this rate.
As for the Kyouko plan, maybe? Her problems are somewhat complicated and personal. "Befriend and maker things better" feels somewhat vague and strange. Plus, it seems somewhat like a distraction or a "pity" task. Or maybe I'm just the one that's being weird.
It makes somewhat sense she feels like this, in a way. There hasn't been much going on lately or any huge problems lately. So the focus has been on helping and training her, which probably makes her feel self-conscious. And she's also brand new, which makes it worse.
"Befriend and make things better" is
definitely not how I'd phrase it.
I'd put it along the lines of "I'm working on her, but I can't push her on things
ever, so I need somebody to do it for me. She has unspecified socioemotional problems... all I really need you to do is, like, talk to her even
minimally about stuff besides how to kill things good, and then just be yourself, say what you feel like saying. Loudly.
If we're looking for concrete, reachable goals that Sayaka can start working on right now... PMAS is all about the people. Tell Sayaka to start helping us with people. Instead of just telling her about what we're doing with Kyouko, explicitly enlist her. Tell her that it's her job to get Kyouko's story, figure out why she and Mami have so much trouble, and get them back together. Let her know that this is not a simple task and that Kyouko is super prickly, but we got her in the right place and we trust her to finish the job.
So, I
want to do something along those lines
almost. You're
literally on the track that brought me to this.
There's two issues:
1. Privacy, we can't hand out stuff Kyouko's told us in confidence. You're already accounting for that.
2. The
only way Sayaka can screw this up is if she somehow ends up telling Kyouko that we told her to do what she's doing, which could implode things. Based on canon, I would hazard a guess -- as have many people -- that she does not need further instruction beyond "hey you should talk to Kyouko some" to do exactly what we want her to do.
Chances of Sayaka tattling?
Or being annoyed that all this training this would seem to be actually for helping Mami, rather than Sayaka?
Yeah, tattling is the issue. Annoyed? Fuck no. Sayaka is well aware that Kyouko is a
damn good melee guca. This training is
evidently valuable. She's smart, she can recognize that doing something serves two purposes at once. Could it be worth saying that "for reasons that: 1. Kyouko is best meleeguca within 100miles maybe more, 2. social stuff"? Sure, I think so. But I don't think it's a real issue, not when she's
looking to be helpful. That this is helping Mami and Kyouko is only going to be a positive.
"Tattling"... Again, if Sayaka says to Kyouko "Sabrina told me to do xyz because npq", we're fucking sunk and we'll be stuck in a faceoff with Kyouko for a bit, which is the primary counterargument to doing this. We'd probably recover from that but it'd suck. Best way to handle Kyouko is undoubtedly a sort of "good cop bad cop" (more like quiet nice cop loud brash cop) routine with Sayaka playing the latter, but it don't work if Red knows we're orchestrating it.
The question then becomes how much rope to give Sayaka. We want to give her enough to know it's there and enough to know to keep her mouth shut about it, but not enough to make her act particularly differently than usual.
-[X] Brief Sayaka on the broad strokes of the Kyouko issue. Scarce hunting, mental/emotional problems left unspecified because privacy, desire to reconcile Kyouko + Mami conflicting with unspecified Kyouko problems.
--[X] We stay in Kyouko's tolerance by not pushing things too much. But somebody has to push things, or she'll never change... and she needs to change. This is the second motive for the training with Kyouko. It would mean the world to Mami.
---[X] If called for: you have a problem with properly disseminating information, you're trying to stay on the right side of the "beneficent use of information vs manipulative" line, yes Sayaka is the right choice for this, best way to do it is probably to loudly be Sayaka.
The wording I'm trying for is basically "Look, by having you train with Kyouko I'm also aiming for this other objective which is to have you help me help Kyouko (and by extension Mami if we want to add that in). She's got problems... The best way as far as I can tell to do it, though? Literally just have you go loudly be yourself around her. Talk to her and just do and/or say whatever you end up deciding to do. Which, I know, sounds crazy but like
actually I'm convinced enough it's the best option that I'm pursuing it directly."
Honestly I just see that causing problems between Sayaka and Kyoko.
Sayaka will not take the witch farming Kyoko was doing well.
I mean that was canon. We're okay with canon happening here. It'll work out. Sayaka will come back one day bitching about this, we'll lecture Sayaka about past versus present and that'll be the end of that, mostly.
I wanted to say something else...
Oh, yeah.
@Vebyast. At one point I wanted to have a line explaining how 90% of our issues are socialing people into being stable human beings who aren't assholes. I scrapped it as being unnecessary
for now, but the idea stands, yes.
