The weirdest thing I'd say about Riona's reputation is that she
did seemingly want to leave Mitakihara peacefully.
Which would lead to us telling Nadia everything, pretty much every time.
With this MO, Riona's murders definitely should come to light at some point. Are we really the first group she considered too strong to fight, from amongst her targets?
Unacceptable. Given what you just quoted, can you imagine her insisting on anything other than being witchbombed right on the spot? You know that she'd sacrifice herself in an instant, without ever considering the effects her death would have on Madoka or Homura or Sabrina. The point of asking her to think about it was so that she could think about it. I think that her ability to make a rational, well-informed, and well-considered decision about the witchbomb is more important than her ability to commit suicide.
We need to "give up" on the shades, though I think that that wording is disingenuous. I think that it'd be more accurate to say that we shouldn't throw away everything we've gained for a tiny chance of a relatively minor reward. I think that there's little-to-no value in pursuing them further, I think that there's little-to-no chance that we'll get value out of it, I think that there are multiple indications in and out of story that we won't get it, I think that the constant costs outweigh the benefits all on their own, and I think that the expected cost is so much higher that I'd seriously evaluate it up near "Sayaka witches out".
Oh, more reasons we can't possibly recover Riona's shades: Firnagzen would have to write and flesh out two hundred new meguca and populate our nation-state with them. Noooot happening.
The whole reason we gave Sayaka the choice to get Wichbombed is because we've figured she can take it.
Sure, putting pressure on her is bad -I'd say it's the situation doing the pressuring, though- but it's not nearly as horrifyingly-suicidally-dangerous as I feel you're taking it.
We wouldn't have offered Sayaka the choice if we felt she couldn't take the Witchbomb. She can.
We keep seeds around because if we can even find a way to make them suffer less, it's better than them going to kyubey. These shades will go to the regular old afterlife, hardly a fate akin to that.
By that token, we could smash Grief Seeds and let them go to the afterlife. They're probably suffering more than the shades, given what Witches are.
At least we could Clear every Seed we come across, but we don't.
The shades are the same problem as the Seeds but in a much lower scale. We can try to keep them around, maybe suffering, and try to save them, something extremely difficult, just as it is with Grief Seeds.
There's lots of reasons to not do this:
It's not what we set out to do when we started.
It puts unfair pressure on Sayaka.
We have
a lot on our plate, even if we tried to offload this responsibility to Niko, or someone else. Hell, Niko's also on the de-Witching train, so unless working with shades gives her insight into de-Witching, this is also overloading her plate of things to deal with.
It's a really long shot.
I think the main reasons to
try are:
We've already figured Sayaka can take the Witchbomb. Yes, it's shitty to put pressure on her, but she's had
some advance warning, and I think she would choose to try. Thus...
She would blame
herself if she didn't try to save the shades. Mitigating points: We can try and shoulder the responsibility; we can honestly say there's an afterlife, even if we don't have proof, so the shades went
somewhere...
