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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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I feel Riona's entire purpose narratively is to test how much we really buy into the whole "everyone is worth saving" ideal when we don't have an easy "I sympathize" button in metaknowledge about their backstory and/or thoughts and motivations.

Riona is someone who Madokami would forgive and let into her Heaven. Will we be the same?
 
Conjured Blade said:
Theres something you overlooked.

"Thinks deserves it?"

Who else is there to judge? Magical Girl society is the Hobbesian state of nature, where the only justice is what you make.

We can make justice by targeting her but in the end, "Thinks they deserve it" is the only real standard for meguca.
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So, what, there's no objective morality, therefore we should leave the Iowa Group alone? And all of the fights we've intervened in, we should have let them keep going? Maybe you're about to say that we should have just let Oriko do whatever she decided to do, because who are we to judge what she does after looking into the future?
Random832 said:
Uh, what?

The point is that we're willing to forgive people for their past actions and give them a chance to be better. That's not incoherent unless we decide, arbitrarily, not to do that this time. What right do we have to keep telling Homura not to kill Oriko after this?
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Except the argument here isn't "we shouldn't judge her". It's "we should let her go back to whatever she was doing". If we let Riona go home, then you're right, we have no grounds in which to keep Homura from killing Oriko. We can't fight the Iowa Group. Kyubey has to be allowed to continue. Because we have no right to be asking questions about their reasons or their powers, and they're just trying to do the best they can in a horrible cynical world, and who are we to decide that there's a better way for everyone to live?

We are literally here to fix everything. Riona is part of the problem. She needs to be fixed. We are stopping her one way or another, and if that's not though social, we're going to fight her. Just like every other girl we run into that goes around killing people.
 
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Just because we don't have the means to offer Rionna a solution she'll accept right now, doesn't mean we never will

Killing/gemming her in a fit of moral outrage is premature, unnecessary, and out of character
 
zxzx24 said:
Anyway. What I would recommend changing.
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Thanks for the support and suggestions!

Some of what you desire to be fixed is intentional. I've never been a fan of the robotic feeling 'I must never get angry at anybody' version of Sabrina who constantly, constantly bends over backwards to avoid giving offense. I know it's not how this very wordy thread tends to operate, but I like the idea of a firm, no-nonsense Sabrina who draws a line in the sand and says 'no further'.

Simultaneously, I am absolutely aghast at the level of hostility the thread has been displaying towards Riona, but am trying to take this into account dispite my disagreement with them.

With those thoughts in mind, a level of confrontation is intentional. A form of compromise between the thread's hostility, Sabrina's moral stance and my own desire to display a bit of spine. However, I do want to avoid provoking her via needless confrontation. So it might be wise to dial it back a bit, you're right. I'll think on it.

I also ended up avoiding mentioning the dewitching project, I'm still on the fence about bringing that up just yet. Sayaka copying powers, Hildegard feeding on 'hope', that sort of thing would be associated with the dewitching. Before bringing that up, I want to gauge her reaction to Sabrina's efforts to break the system. Or in other words, that'd all be for next vote. Seriously, how often does more than half a vote get left behind? Can't fit everything into every vote, and I'm already verging on being a bit wordy.

In summary, I'll take your suggestions under advisement and think about how to improve the vote along those lines, but I'll avoid making changes just yet. Feel free to ping me about this later if I go dark and more than just us have voted for it.
 
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Vebyast said:
So, what, there's no objective morality, therefore we should leave the Iowa Group alone? And all of the fights we've intervened in, we should have let them keep going? Maybe you're about to say that we should have just let Oriko do whatever she decided to do, because who are we to judge what she does after looking into the future?

Except the argument here isn't "we shouldn't judge her". It's "we should let her go back to whatever she was doing". If we let Riona go home, then you're right, we have no grounds in which to keep Homura from killing Oriko. We can't fight the Iowa Group. Kyubey has to be allowed to continue. Because we have no right to be asking questions about their reasons or their powers, and they're just trying to do the best they can in a horrible cynical world, and who are we to decide that there's a better way for everyone to live?

We are literally here to fix everything. Riona is part of the problem. She needs to be fixed. If we can't social her, we stop her.
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I'm saying don't think we're special. And that socialing her may need risky Xanatos gambits. We're trying to make our own justice, overwrite the state of nature, ease people's suffering but that doesn't make us special beyond the anomaly of our power if we succeed. It just means we won. In the State Of Nature, killing people because you think they deserve it isn't a special kind of evil.
 
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TitanFrost said:
I haven't read through all the pages of discussion, so tell me if this was already suggested, but I feel that a good way to get a glimpse of her true intentions would be to take a steadfast stance of "get out, I won't work with you if you do this." If she's willing to reveal what she wants at all, she'll then be the one with the impetus to argue with us for something. If her first option after that is violence, still gives us a pretty good idea of the kind of person we're dealing with, doesn't it?
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It's a dangerous stance of a couple of levels.

If she does get aggressive, that's probably gonna end in tears.

If she shrugs and leaves, disregarding possibilities that she keeps murdering people and enslaving their souls, we failed to get her agreement to help with de-Witchification.

She plays hardball, we play hardball, nobody budges, nobody wins.

I don't think Riona will just budge.
 
AuraTwilight said:
Kay, well, again, Homura and Kyouko didn't threaten to murder us for trying to social them.
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And again, we didn't start dialogue with Kyouko or Homura with "You're power and actions disgusts me, you should do what I say either" You know? Which is probably what this looks like to Riona. If we'd opened on that with Koko, she also would have told us to fuck off or she'd fuck us up.

Godwinson said:
Telling Rionna to confirm anything with Nadia means she leaves the privacy field and can call on all of her shades.
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True, problematic because we definitely want to keep here here until we either reach some sort of accord or go for Alpha gemming.

Vebyast said:
So, what, there's no objective morality, therefore we should leave the Iowa Group alone? And all of the fights we've intervened in, we should have let them keep going? Maybe you're about to say that we should have just let Oriko do whatever she decided to do, because who are we to judge what she does after looking into the future?
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If you want to have an argument, your response should not be straw man. We aren't saying that we shouldn't try to stop her, we're saying that judging her does not help us get her on our side. And that having her come around willingly is much preferable to alpha striking her, not the least of which because we might lose.

Aranfan said:
Letting her go to continue slaving is out of character.
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I'm getting real tired of this comment getting spammed. Every magical girl is a slaver, they're offloading their means of continued existence onto the souls of other girls. And yet, we aren't all up in arms about how no girl should ever touch a grief seed ever again. We haven't found a way to fix it, we are trying to find a way to fix Riona's situation. Jumping right to "SMASH NAO" Solves little. Again, because we might lose.
 
See, this is why I don't want to try talking down people like the Iowa Group. Even if they don't have sob stories they're going to be damn good at pretending they do, and then we're going to have to argue about whether it's actually bad that they're running around extorting entire cities out of there grief seeds and whether stopping them is even the right thing to do. Fuck that.
argentorum said:
If you want to have an argument, your response should not be straw man. We aren't saying that we shouldn't try to stop her, we're saying that judging her does not help us get her on our side. And that having her come around willingly is much preferable to alpha striking her, not the least of which because we might lose.
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Tell that to the rest of your side.
 
argentorum said:
I'm getting real tired of this comment getting spammed. Every magical girl is a slaver, they're offloading their means of continued existence onto the souls of other girls. And yet, we aren't all up in arms about how no girl should ever touch a grief seed ever again.
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Last I checked the thread loathed QB utterly for setting up this system?

kinigget said:
Do you have an actual point, or are you just going to keep saying "slavery" like it's going to change people's minds?
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Holding people in thrall to do your bidding is evil, and Sabrina isn't the type to let evil continue if she has a shot at stopping it?
 
Vebyast said:
See, this is why I don't want to try talking down people like the Iowa Group. Even if they don't have sob stories they're going to be damn good at pretending they do, and then we're going to have to argue about whether it's actually bad that they're running around extorting entire cities out of there grief seeds and whether stopping them is even the right thing to do. Fuck that. Tell that to the rest of your side.
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Then I suppose we were wrong to try and talk to O&K and Anri and the girls who were extorting the University Group, etc? Because if doing morally reprehensible things precludes human treatment on our part, well, I'm not really sure what we're doing anymore.

Yes, we will probably end of fighting the Iowa group. Yes we may very much end up fighting Riona. But I refuse to accept that as the option of first resort.

Aranfan said:
Last I checked the thread loathed QB utterly for setting up this system?
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Last I checked Riona was a product of that system?
 
Aranfan said:
Last I checked the thread loathed QB utterly for setting up this system?



Holding people in thrall to do your bidding is evil, and Sabrina isn't the type to let evil continue if she has a shot at stopping it?
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What do we do if dewitching comes before widespread replication of our power? Forcibly Recall all the clear seeds and let new witches be born repeatedly as we dewitch them?
 
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skaianDestiny said:
I feel Riona's entire purpose narratively is to test how much we[snip]
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More like it's to test how much obvious and unrepentant evil we'll accept if it serves our own ends.

That's the fundamental difference between Rionna and Homura or Kyouko or Oriko.

Homura? When and where necessary, painlessly, and doesn't if it's not necessary. (Otherwise she would never have stopped killing Oriko and Kirika.)

Kyouko? Negligent manslaughter which she drops as soon as there's someone around who she doesn't want to turn out 'bad' like her.

Oriko? Actively trying to make the world a better place with her dying in the process because she accepted that what she did was evil (justified evil in her mind) but accepted death as a just price for it.

Rionna actively doesn't give a fuck if the souls of the people she's killed are aware, if they actually were "justified targets", bragged about them "kicking and screaming" as she killed them, and when we even tried to bring up the idea of her stopping in exchange for cleansing she said she'd kill us if we kept trying to tell her to stop.

The other three recognize that a necessary evil is still an evil, while Rionna? Threatens to kill you if you try to convince her to stop.
Adhoc vote count started by Godwinson on Aug 2, 2018 at 3:13 PM, finished with 142670 posts and 25 votes.
  • [X] Reaction: Disappointment.
    -[X] Calm down.
    -[X] Offer cleansing and cleanse yourself.
    [X] Look Riona in the eyes. Override interruptions.
    -[X] Put your cards on the table. Your goals are:
    --[X] To free Magical Girls from the need for Seeds and territory; to allow them to have normal lives.
    --[X] To reverse Witchification.
    -[X] Nadia thinks we're crazy for wanting this, but both she and Kyuubey confirmed our power works. We cando this.
    [X] Ask Riona:
    -[X] Whether she can help with any of that.
    -[X] What does she want?
    [x] Keep Rionna talking.
    -[x] Flat out tell her that you want her help with dewitching, and that you're offering her the cleansing she wants. Why is she so willing to leave?
    [x] ABSOLUTELY DO NOT LET RIONNA NOTICE THIS, KEEP YOUR EMOTIONAL REACTION TO THIS MUTED:
    -[x] Calmly message Mami with grief, requesting that she not react and contact Homura for timestop, please.
    --[x] You need to discuss what Rionna has said with Mami, Homura, and Sayaka to decide what to do. You won't commit to any action without that discussion first.
    ---[x] Keep calm, do not commit to hostile action against Rionna in your mind.
    [x] You flew half way around the world to find a real Grief cleanser, and you're just going to leave? No. You came here looking for something. Well, so am I. Let's deal.
    [x] I'm trying to figure out how to turn a witch back into a person. The Clear Seed is the first step. They have thousands of times the capacity of regular Grief Seeds. One of these can keep a magical girl clean for centuries. And eventually we hope to enchant something that will do the job without needing souls at all. No more witchouts. No more used Seeds going into Kyubey's back for him to do god-knows-what to. No more need for girls to put themselves through this hell of hunting and fighting to survive. We can all just live like real people.
    [x] When we no longer need Seeds to survive, we can start helping them, too. We've already gotten some small results from injecting positive emotions into the Clear Seed. Your soul powers might be the key to making this back into a Soul Gem.
    [x] You came here looking for a charlatan, a dragon to slay, but I'm not your enemy. I want to help people. Ask Nadia Bennouna, she'll confirm that I'm for real.
    [x] You fought the false Grief Cleansers because they were witching girls out. We don't want anyone to witchout either. We can make a world where no one does, ever again.
    [x] Please. Help us.
    [X] You don't care, do you?
    [X] Gem her if the answer is no.
    [X] Sigh, relax your visible tension, maybe slump a little bit.
    -[X] "You're not very easy to work with."
    [X] Explain and demonstrate your power
    -[X] Pull grief from your soul gem, float it around, make a few shapes. Perhaps a flute that starts softly playing music?
    -[X] Pull a little bit of grief from a grief seed, just to prove its possible
    --[X] Explain that floating grief is easy to manage, especially given use of a 4th dimension of space. If the cloud ever gets to be a bit too much you can just shove it down Kyubey's backhole. We can demonstrate this afterwards if she'd like.
    [X] After power explanation, move on to explaining your goals.
    -[X] Emphasize your desire for magical girls around the world to be able to live normal lives
    --[X] Ultimately, you want to break Kyubey's wretched system of grief and suffering, and replace it with something better
    ---[X] Some enchanted artefact that can absorb grief, or the proliferation of clear seeds or something that'll ensure magical girls can live long and peaceful lives, witches can be slowly but surely removed as a threat, and maybe Kyubey can even still accumulate grief for his anti-entropy efforts.
    [X] Now Riona knows what you can do and what your goals are. What's her place going to be in things?
    -[X] She can choose to help Sabrina with her powers, with her experience and very different perspective
    -[X] She can choose to go home in peace and deal with her own shit for however long it takes for Sabrina to fix things and bring infinite cleansings all the way to Ireland
    -[X] She can, for whatever reason, oppose this. Preferably with logical argument rather than sudden hostilities. Maaaybe don't mention this? Let it go unsaid unless she comments.
    --[X] Whatever her immediate choices, know that enslaved and possibly suffering shades of the dead won't be tolerated forever. That kind of shit belongs in Kyubey's system, not ours.
    [X] Discretely call Mami for an emergency timestop meeting with her, Homura and Sayaka
    -[X] Get them up to date with the meering with Riona.
    -[X] Discuss the next course of action
    [x] Why?
    [X]You want my power that badly? Do you have any power copiers you can try to get mine? The ones I've met can't do it. I could use an insurance policy.
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Is it bad that I think that letting her continue what she's doing may actually leave the world a better place than killing her?

I'm completely fine with a magical girl vigilante going around, killing false grief controllers because that always ends in sadness. That's probably is a lot more good than your average magical girl will be able to do. And I think that imprisonment with slavery is strictly better than murder, since it can be ended with death and may be reversible. So, I think that letting her go is not completely awful, though not an entirely optimal state of affairs.
 
Conjured Blade said:
What do we do if dewitching comes before widespread replication of our power? Recall all the clear seeds and let new witches be born?
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Obviously we use clear seeds to stop people from suffering INFINITE DESPAIR until we find a way to replicate grief cleaning. Then do the recall. We will, however, be actively working towards grief cleaning enchantments or whatever, unlike Riona who seems to enjoy stealing souls.
 
Aranfan said:
She goes above and beyond in doing what she's doing. And she has zero interest in reforming. She isn't sad that she has to do this, she likes doing it.
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Unless it's a provocation so she can get our power guilt-free.

Aranfan said:
Obviously we use clear seeds to stop people from suffering INFINITE DESPAIR until we find a way to replicate grief cleaning. Then do the recall. We will, however, be actively working towards grief cleaning enchantments or whatever, unlike Riona who seems to enjoy stealing souls.
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Still Human Trafficking/keeping people in our thrall.
 
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Aranfan said:
Letting her go to continue slaving is out of character.
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She's not a slaver by unbiased choice - her power is her power, and she needs to use it to some extent to survive (pre us), and change is scary and we are probably not the first one to object on moral grounds...

Killing slavers as a policy is not a good idea if there are lots of mostly initially unwilling slavers who were dealt a bad lot, and only went with slaving to survive. Means killing lots of girls who'll probably be very willing to fight to live.
OTOH, not killing slavers as a policy, once we've broken the system they might give up slaving willingly if it means they don't have to use their powers to live.
 
My entire argument is that we don't actually have grounds to condemn her because we have so little information about what she has actually done and why

Right now she's feeding us the worst possible interpretation because she's edgy like that

No, I'm not going to fault her for using the tools she has available to her to try to carve a little safety into the world, but i will ask that she stop when we have a non-lethal solution

Death is the one punishment you can't take back after all
 
kinigget said:
My entire argument is that we don't actually have grounds to condemn her because we have so little information about what she has actually done and why

Right now she's feeding us the worst possible interpretation because she's edgy like that

No, I'm not going to fault her for using the tools she has available to her to try to carve a little safety into the world, but i will ask that she stop when we have a non-lethal solution

Death is the one punishment you can't take back after all
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There is no possible way her power is less ethically problematic than ours. That was made completely clear to us in the first paragraph of her explanation. And the way Riona is behaving, she'd probably be happily committing atrocities if she had the power to multiply loaves of bread.
 
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skaianDestiny said:
I feel Riona's entire purpose narratively is to test how much we really buy into the whole "everyone is worth saving" ideal
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Godwinson said:
More like it's to test how much obvious and unrepentant evil we'll accept if it serves our own ends.
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And maybe it's Firn's test in order to determine how much thread needs to go to shit.

Using narrative reasons to guide our in-story actions isn't really a thing that we should do either way.
 
argentorum said:
And again, we didn't start dialogue with Kyouko or Homura with "You're power and actions disgusts me, you should do what I say either" You know? Which is probably what this looks like to Riona. If we'd opened on that with Koko, she also would have told us to fuck off or she'd fuck us up.
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Except that's NOT how we opened up. We asked about her power, she told us, noticed our disgust, and then goaded us and said not to judge her.

TJSomething said:
Is it bad that I think that letting her continue what she's doing may actually leave the world a better place than killing her?

I'm completely fine with a magical girl vigilante going around, killing false grief controllers because that always ends in sadness. That's probably is a lot more good than your average magical girl will be able to do. And I think that imprisonment with slavery is strictly better than murder, since it can be ended with death and may be reversible. So, I think that letting her go is not completely awful, though not an entirely optimal state of affairs.
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Yes, it is bad. Not everyone she turns into a ghost-slave is a grief controller or a bad person. She literally just threw that some of them are muggles or possibly good people in our face.
 
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