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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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About Infohazards... if we bring them up and admit to knowing, first Haruka might assume Mami also knows, so we'd have to bluntly clarify that Mami is willingly not in the know.

If we don't bring up infohazards... I think we can safely assume Haruka is a smart woman who won't blurt out any of the bombs.

So I don't think we should bring them up.
 
Torgamous said:
1. You appear to be taking Hitomi's approval as a given to ensure that your argument is easier.
2. None of that is present in what you want to tell her and is therefore not something you can rely on her hearing.
3. Assuming you did manage to get all that across in whatever "detour" you settle on, "I would have lied about this until your daughter gave you permission to know" might be strictly better than "I would have lied about this indefinitely", but it's still not exactly a great thing to say to a parent
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1. If we seriously can't convince Hitomi that telling her mother is a good idea, I'd rather find another adult and break it to them. We're already going to be "lying" to every single person not in the masquerade except the one we're bringing in to help - why is it any better that we choose Hitmoi's mother than someone else? @Briefvoice isn't wrong when he points out Hitomi is pretty much uninvolved in the magical side of things, including the danger - we aren't bringing her on hunts or into fights.
2. I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean here. Could you clarify?
3. Given that in this scenario Hitmoi's mother does not, in fact, already know about magic I highly doubt that's even going to be brought up in comparison to the worldview-shattering information we'll be sharing. Like, technically it's correct, but I genuinely don't believe she'll even notice compared to the new information we're now dropping on her - that her daughter's friends have magic powers and fight monsters. That entire conversation is going to revolve around Hitomi's safety.

Subrosian_Smithy said:
...can you really not think of any reason why Hitomom might be insulted aside from "not being smart enough to help us"?

K.



We have infinite cleansing, Clear Seeds, and timestop. If you're worried about knock-on emotional effects and upsets, okay; but don't act like this is an issue of survival.



Or, maybe -- just maybe -- she is patient and understands the nature of secrets, but her normal behavior is being overridden by her entirely-reasonable concerns for her daughter's health, life, and sanity.



Hitomi isn't in the closet (metaphorically) because she isn't a meguca.
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1. The contested reaction is her taking offence at our taking a moment to check we aren't completely immediately breaking an important secret she knows is a secret, whilst heavily implying that after confirmation we will in fact divulge the requested information. Why do you think the 10-second check will be offensive?
2. Whilst I agree it's not nearly so bad as it usually would be, given the life-or-death nature of the issue in question a constant drain on emotional wellbeing for the rest of the month is something to be avoided if at all possible.
3. She's the one who took us to a private room to calmly discuss this - explicitly in contradiction to the picture you've just painted.
4. For the purposes of the metaphor, I was speaking from Sayaka's point of view, as was @Briefvoice

SaltyWaffles said:
However, we absolutely shouldn't assume that this is some kind of misunderstanding or that she doesn't actually know anything.
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We aren't assuming such at all. We're just taking a moment to confirm our current assumptions.
 
Again, yes, our reaction gave her all the confirmation she needed

Now we just have to make sure we're actually on the same page, which my proposed "we aren't the first" thing should do quite nicely

So all this arguing about HitomI is quite frankly moot because it's already out of her hands
 
The Narrator said:
Again, I must repeat. She is asking someone she just met to reveal what she must assume is their most closely guarded secret. She should be fully expecting them to be somewhat hesitant. If she loses her shit over that then she's not someone we can trust, because she'll blab any secret that we share with her at the first opportunity.
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And again I must repeat, expecting something and wanting it are two different things. Her expecting something doesn't mean she won't prefer it not to happen. I expect she will be much happier with us if we're up front with her than if we try to undermine her parental authority by trying to hide this. No, I don't think she will "lose her shit". No furniture will be thrown and we're not going to have to restrain her while Hitomi talks her down. She's just going to trust us less, because we will have openly admitted to being more deceptive than if we don't try to deceive her.
Deathbybunnies said:
Given that in this scenario Hitmoi's mother does not, in fact, already know about magic
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No, in this scenario she does know about magic and is considering what we would have done if she didn't.
 
Even if clarification was warranted, leading with it means that we're not leading with our condolences.
The Narrator said:
Again, she knows this is a thing usually kept secret. That's why she took us aside to talk privately. She should fully expect some reluctance to share.
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She took us aside so that we could share more publicly. And then she broke the ice, said that the sky was blue, and asked for a straight answer.

This leads into our other goal here. We can't afford to do what she expects. You know what she's expecting right now? She's expecting us to all die over the course of the next two weeks to two years as we make stupid decisions and witch out. And she's expecting Hitomi to suffer as she watches all of her friends die painful worse-than-deaths. That "I was a teenager once too" line makes me feel like there's some element there of "I was such a fool", coming from a general perception that contracts aren't worth it and that teenagers are critically short on wisdom and critical thinking. We need to convince her that we can handle that problem.

Furthermore, we intend to enlist her assistance in completing our mission. We need to kick her out of the mode where she is thinking about us as a teenager and into a mode where she believes that we are a responsible, effective leader with the wisdom and sagacity to wrangle a literal civilization of traumatized teenage girls.

And finally, recall that her primary concern here is to protect her daughter, and that right now she's thinking back to when she was in exactly Hitomi's position.

Excessive caution is not helping our case here. And I guarantee that she feels that she has demonstrated sufficient understanding to make any requests for clarification excessive. At best we could play it off as a self-deprecating joke.

Our goal is to demonstrate that we understand the gravity of the situation, demonstrate respect her feelings and her experiences, show her that we can handle a problem of this magnitude, and that we're not being overconfident, arrogant, or short-sighted. We need to demonstrate both that we understand the situation and that we can address it.

This is why I believe that our next words should be a simple "I'm sorry for your loss". This simple response demonstrates:
  • Compassion
  • The understanding that she must have lost someone.
  • That we understand that magical girls suffer and die.
  • That we understand that she knows that magical girls suffer and die.
  • That we have the maturity to take the problem seriously.
  • An implicit belief that being a magical girl is not worth it.
  • The maturity necessary to not try to pointlessly hide shit from her.
And we lose all of that if it's not the first thing we do.

Also? You're arguing again that someone is a sooper-dooper secret agent woman who instantly concludes that the slightest hint of wanting to share information is grounds for discarding someone as a useless, worthless waste of air. We've been over this. That's not how human beings work. You've done with with both Madoka and her mother. I'm getting really tired of it.
 
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Torgamous said:
No, in this scenario she does know about magic and is considering what we would have done if she didn't.
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Oh, my mistake. In that case, assuming we're modelling of my intentions here, the simple answer is "I don't know, I didn't think it would happen and would cross that bridge when I got to it" because I do think it pretty unlikely that Hitomi wouldn't give us permission, and I'm not sure what I'd do in that situation.
kinigget said:
And once again you guys are arguing a moot point
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Point's not moot, we aren't discussing whether or not she knows we're hiding something, we're discussing the possibility she thinks "magical girls" refers to something else, like lesbianism.
 
Vebyast said:
Even if clarification was warranted, leading with it means that we're not leading with our condolences.

She took us aside so that we could share more publicly. And then she broke the ice, said that the sky was blue, and asked for a straight answer.

This leads into our other goal here. We can't afford to do what she expects. You know what she's expecting right now? She's expecting us to all die over the course of the next two weeks to two years as we make stupid decisions and witch out. And she's expecting Hitomi to suffer as she watches all of her friends die painful worse-than-deaths. That "I was a teenager once too" line makes me feel like there's some element there of "I was such a fool", coming from a general perception that contracts aren't worth it and that teenagers are critically short on wisdom and critical thinking. We need to convince her that we can handle that problem.

Furthermore, we intend to enlist her assistance in completing our mission. We need to kick her out of the mode where she is thinking about us as a teenager and into a mode where she believes that we are a responsible, effective leader with the wisdom and sagacity to wrangle a literal civilization of traumatized teenage girls.

And finally, recall that her primary concern here is to protect her daughter, and that right now she's thinking back to when she was in exactly Hitomi's position.

Excessive caution is not helping our case here. And I guarantee that she feels that she has demonstrated sufficient understanding to make any requests for clarification excessive. At best we could play it off as a self-deprecating joke.

Our goal is to demonstrate that we understand the gravity of the situation, demonstrate respect her feelings and her experiences, show her that we can handle a problem of this magnitude, and that we're not being overconfident, arrogant, or short-sighted. We need to demonstrate both that we understand the situation and that we can address it.

This is why I believe that our next words should be a simple "I'm sorry for your loss". This simple response demonstrates:
  • Compassion
  • The understanding that she must have lost someone.
  • That we understand that magical girls suffer and die.
  • That we understand that she knows that magical girls suffer and die.
  • That we have the maturity to take the problem seriously.
  • An implicit belief that being a magical girl is not worth it.
  • The maturity necessary to not try to pointlessly hide shit from her.
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Even if we take her knowing magic as a given - and it is not - not only do we still not know for sure she lost someone (other possible ways she could know about magic remain, including her being a girl who refused Kyubey's offer and whose potential faded) but I'm not convinced that immediately offering sympathies is the optimal response, given that she has in no way brought it up - an intuitive leap that she probably lost someone has been made, but she's given no indication of such nor of her wanting to discuss it.

Your modelling of the human psyche appears sufficiently different to mine that I don't think we're going to convince one another, and I am mostly replying to offer a counterpoint for other readers that not only are your arguments are grounded in various assumptions we simply have not verified, but that it would be easy to do so.
 
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And this is why I think that our next words should be a soft "we aren't the first Magical Girls you've known are we?"

Because it does all the same things "I'm sorry for your loss" does, except without jumping the gun and sounding weird
 
Karnewarrior said:
Veb. I've had clearance for classified information before. One of the first things they teach you about knowing Classified information is that when someone says "Oh yeah I know all about that classified thing with the planes!" you don't respond with "OH YOU MEAN THE TYPE 2400000 SUPER-SECRET ENGINE PROTOTYPE WOW I DIDN'T KNOW YOU KNEW!" even if you know they have the same level of clearance as you do.

We don't know that Hitomi's mom actually knows for real and for certain. I reiterate - if she gets mad that we won't blab on classified information, she's an idiot. Even if she already knows we have an obligation to maintain secrecy until we can ascertain that she really does know with absolute, legal certainty, not just intuition and "basic" human understanding. That shit does not fly.
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When you are disclosing classified info to a potential asset, it's silly to play coy about it.

And that's if this was classified, we did not sign a non-disclosure agreement with Kyuubey - that we know of.
 
Deathbybunnies said:
Point's not moot, we aren't discussing whether or not she knows we're hiding something, we're discussing the possibility she thinks "magical girls" refers to something else, like lesbianism.
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We know that she's not because of this:
Firnagzen said:
"I must first apologise in advance if this sounds strange," Mrs Shizuki says, smiling in a rather self-depreciating way. "I wasn't quite sure with Sayaka, but I think, on seeing all of you, that I'm right."
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Sayaka. She had suspicions about Sayaka. Who literally everyone knows has a crush on Kyousuke, except Kyousuke.

This is clearly not about lesbianism.
 
kinigget said:
And this is why I think that our next words should be a soft "we aren't the first Magical Girls you've known are we?"

Because it does all the same things "I'm sorry for your loss" does, except without jumping the gun and sounding weird
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Honestly, if we were sufficiently vague about it until she actually confirms what she means, I'd be up for that.
mistfist said:
Sayaka. She had suspicions about Sayaka. Who literally everyone knows has a crush on Kyousuke, except Kyousuke.

This is clearly not about lesbianism.
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Literally all of Sayaka's friends know about her crush on Kyousuke - we don't know Hitomi's mom does.

Like, I'm not arguing that Hitomi's mom isn't probably in the know. I'm arguing that we don't know for sure that she is, that we can check very easily for literally no cost, and that claims of offense and opportunity cost to doing so are simply not grounded in reality.

EDIT: Can the people who think Hitomi's mom is going to blow up at us for not immediately delving into the details of a well-kept secret really not think of a way of wording the question that she wouldn't immediately take offense to? Let me be clear: If she's unwilling to not spend the 10 seconds clarifying her meaning, I don't think we want her as our "adult contact."
 
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Vebyast said:
Also? You're arguing again that someone is a sooper-dooper secret agent woman who instantly concludes that the slightest hint of wanting to share information is grounds for discarding someone as a useless, worthless waste of air. We've been over this. That's not how human beings work. You've done with with both Madoka and her mother. I'm getting really tired of it.
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What on earth are you talking about? Putting aside the absurd way that you're exaggerating my position in this matter, which is pretty much par for the course with you, when have I ever argued that regarding Madoka or Junko? I was arguing for sharing more information with Madoka so that she'd be less likely to contract. You guys were the ones who didn't want to tell her anything.



mistfist said:
Sayaka. She had suspicions about Sayaka. Who literally everyone knows has a crush on Kyousuke, except Kyousuke.
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I don't think Sayaka's crush on Kyousuke is quite as universally well-known as you're suggesting. Sayaka's own parents thought she might be a lesbian after we visited her in the hospital. One wonders what Hitomi's parents might think of how deferential Sayaka has been to Hitomi since the fire.
 
Vebyast said:
This is why I believe that our next words should be a simple "I'm sorry for your loss".
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As people have pointed out, we don't actually know that she lost anybody, and even if she has, she hasn't told us about it, so offering condolences is going to make her think we know things about her that we shouldn't. That's not going to garner the positive response that you think it will. It's going to either confuse her or make her suspicious.
 
Assume Haruka knows what she's talking about.

Think about what it means for her, as a mom, that her daugther is surrounded by lesbians Magical Girls.

Think about how worried she is. There's even helpful hints about it, in-update.

Think about what her opinion of us must be right now, shaped by her knowledge of Magical Girls, and their usual fates.

Think about how she expects us to react.

Tell me us being serious and understanding about the danger of Magical Girl life is not the best Haruka could hope for.

Be serious, be understanding. Inquire softly as to whether she's lost someone or not due to this, because if she has, then offering condolences, showing we understand what's at place, would be the most reassuring thing Haruka could hear right now.
 
landcollector said:
You have yet to be convincing that this is actually a good idea. I have an inkling her response to that may be a confused look or some variation of "what?".
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Q: How does she know that magical girls exist?
A: She knew one. No other way.
Q: Who did she know, then?
A: Probably a friend. Maybe multiple friends, since magical girls tend to run in groups. If it wasn't a friend she'd have been mindwiped.
Q: How old is she?
A: Maybe around 40 or 50.
Q: How long has it been since she was a teenager?
A: 20-30 years.
Q: How long do magical girls live?
A: A couple of years tops.
Q: What is the chance that her friend or friends are still alive?
A: Effectively zero.
Q: Does she know how/why/that they died?
A: Given how worried she's being about this? Yes.

QED.

Also, now that I think about it, she's going "This may sound strange" and "I was a teenager too" and pulling a couple away from a group that she really could have asked as a group, which are all solid techniques for keeping a discussion comfortable and "safe". So she knows that being meguca is suffering, and she may know what makes people contract, and she's basically acting like a therapist talking to some traumatized children - keep everything calm, build rapport, don't corner them or challenge them, gently provide openings so they don't have to feel like they're exposing themselves by sharing, etc.

Actually. Let's use that. You want to gain her respect? Completely subvert her expectations.

[] Responsible, Capable Adult Mode. Respect the gravity of the situation, act with consideration and understanding, and meet her as an equal.
[] She knew a magical girl at one point, didn't she? You're sorry for her loss.
[] Reassure her about her daughter and her daughter's friends. You understand the challenges and you're ready for them.
[] Ask if she's still in contact with the lying rat.
[] Let her know that you'd already been thinking of talking to her.
[] Read her in on your ideals, goals, and general plans, particularly as they relate to helping the people around you: You have the power to make it so that being meguca is not suffering and you intend to make it happen.

The Narrator said:
What on earth are you talking about? Putting aside the absurd way that you're exaggerating my position in this matter, which is pretty much par for the course with you, when have I ever argued that regarding Madoka or Junko? I was arguing for sharing more information with Madoka so that she'd be less likely to contract. You guys were the ones who didn't want to tell her anything.
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Sometime around the time we were meeting with Nadia at the coffee shop, you were arguing that Madoka was a hard woman who made hard decisions, a pattern of behavior that she had learned from her tough-as-nails high-power businesswoman mother. Though maybe I'm misremembering and you were just on a bandwagon with theeeyes. Though I'm pretty sure it was you, since I also remember you bragging about how you were a trained negotiator with over six hundred deals under your belt and that this was how real business worked in the real world.
Onmur said:
Be serious, be understanding. Inquire softly as to whether she's lost someone or not due to this, because if she has, then offering condolences, showing we understand what's at place, would be the most reassuring thing Haruka could hear right now.
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Fair point, added.
 
Vebyast said:
Q: How does she know that magical girls exist?
A: She knew one. No other way.
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Unless Kyuubey tried to contract her and she asked ALL the questions.

I don't think that it's silly to show reluctance to talk about magical girls, but Kinigget's opener sidesteps all that. So, I'm just going to combine SaltyWaffles recommendation with Kinigget's opener:

[] "We aren't the first Magical Girls you've known, are we?" Find out what she knows, but don't probe too hard.
[] Confirm that you are magical girls, along with everyone but Madoka and Hitomi--though you hope it stays that way. Hitomi doesn't have the potential to become a magical girl, either. Madoka and Hitomi are both in the know, too.
[] Address her concerns, and reassure her.
-[] Strength, experience, and capability of your team.
-[] Your specific power (Grief control)
-[] Hitomi linked by telepathy, able to call for help at any time
-[] Hitomi shows no desire or potential to contract.
[] If the opportunity arises, bring up the subject of the incoming meguca refugees/immigrants, and the need to house them all.
 
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