Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

[The Phoenixian]

A short list of potentially invalid assumptions:

1. All souls behave the same when Homura carries them.
2. A soul only manifests in a single body in any given reality.
3. Souls necessarily connect to their other manifestations in a given reality.

Some models which would fall out from checking violations of these assumptions:

• The mental time travel that Homura has is a special case as a result of her Wish to go back and personally do it over again. Without that specific part of her wish causing her soul to manifest through an existing vessel we'd be seeing a Crisis On Infinite Homurae. Homura and Moemura existing simultaneously is I believe only found in some non-canon works, but the mechanical possibility may transfer over from non-canon works the same way the Grief Seed travel did.
• A soul's manifestations have to collaborate to unify into a single manifestation. This is normally trivial and part of the fundamental property of being a soul. The phenomenon of Wish Rejection is another result of this mechanism - the Wish is granted/powered by the collective Soul, and a rejected Wish is a manifestation rejecting the soul and in the process losing access to the power. Witches are too far turned inward to reach out and connect like this.
• A soul defends itself from the grossly negative feelings of a Witched-Out portion by walling it off and refusing to give it enough bandwidth to unify in the same way that magical girls can if they're traveling with their whole spirit.
• In the same way that a magical girl who rejects her Wish loses the power that's associated with the Wish, a magical girl who rejects her soul becomes a Witch. Dewitching is the process of convincing a girl to take her soul back up. They may come out as a slightly different manifestation of the soul, the same way Oriko's new power is not the same as her original power, but it's still the same girl.
• ~Magic~

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I think the first is the simplest and most reasonable explanation here. It's internally consistent with what we know of magic, especially Homura's timestop, working as intended and expected rather than as any sort of physics would dictate.

Homura's specific intent when she wishes to go back in time is to go back and and live that part of her life again. She ends up in her younger body because that is entirely the point of the wish.

When she does it in Homura's Revenge, it's that same intent, but this time sharing it with Madoka: Going back and trying that part of their lives again, with everything they've learned since.

Similarly when Kyuubey does it in Wraith Arc: Taking everything he's learned and transferring it across timelines.

In contrast, when Homura takes a grief seed back, she's not intending to live her life again and also have that witch return to the past with memories ad situation intact as well. Her intention is to take that seed back with her as a piece of equipment, as a safeguard, or as a memento.

None of those things involve the witch overwriting their own past life. Thus, the grief seed comes back with her in the same way that Nadia's gun did.

Thanks! Yep, my memory was spot on, we had something there... but then never really explored past it. As I suggested earlier, What if we simply amplified the experiment by severalfold? If the hope of one magical girl is not enough, what about 3? 4? 6? It probably would take quite a bit of hope to equal the amount of hope that was expended during the birth of a Witch.

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I do think there's potential in just plain filling up with sheer volume of magic but, as far as getting that specific response goes, I think Aurora's response there was to us being on an IRC during that point. It's one of the things we were doing the first day but not the next morning.

In particular that one leaps out at me because she's an internet forum themed witch. It's not so very strange that our time on the internet would be the thing of greatest interest to her.

... We should probably have Oriko and Kirika feed her next time we meet. If us being on IRC was what did it, then Kirika teaching Oriko to shitpost should drive her wild.

 

[Vebyast]

i, but not Madoka's. Never Madoka's.

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Hold on. How would Homura have ever gotten Madoka's Grief Seed? Homura got witchbombed the hard way when Sayaka witched out, so Madoka must have died to gemsmash or physical trauma every loop before that. But Gretchen was a planet-killer by that point, so there's no way that Homura could have defeated her to obtain Madoka's grief seed.


Anyway, on the topic at hand: Frankly, I've been assuming this behavior was the case since the beginning. It's hard to believe that each soul would have exactly one connection to a given mortal in any given reality when we've seen innumerable shenanigans related to sealed versions of people and people remembering other realities and so on and so forth. It makes much more sense that Homura's memories-only travel is a special thing due to her Wish and that other methods of traveling between realities would have different effects.

On dewitching, I expect that it's going to turn out to be something like Kirika's Antimagic - there's some hidden-in-plain-sight bullshit that will either be guessed out of the blue with zero warning or will be handed to us at the end of the game as a pity victory. I figure that dewitching will vary on a case-by-case basis, because it's obviously all about the people and everyone is different. It'll probably be most easily accomplished by getting a girl to talk to a witchy version of herself, in which case they'll merge once the witchy version is no longer so unhappy that her memories would instantly cause the magical girl to witch out. Otherwise we'll have to talk to the witchy girl ourselves and she'll have to regenerate a body for herself.


If we're going to investigate dewitching and the solution is in this direction, I'd actually say that the single best person we could do research with would be Kirika, if Homura has one of her or Oriko's grief seeds in storage. I'm actually pretty sure that O&K are the healthiest people we know right now, and Kirika in particular is totally irrepressible and perfectly equipped for pulling a sad version of herself (or a sad version of Oriko) out of her slump.

 

[Ebguinea]

Another idea -or at least an adjacent idea- is to feel out the witch's nature and try to work out the girl's wish if it's not already known, then try to empathize(or sympathize, for that been there factor, preferably from someone with a similar wish) with the wish in question and send hope flavored with the sentiment of what they originally wished for, preferably combined with the group welcoming them back. This will hopefully rekindle what drove them originally and give them a guiding light to follow.

Something that would greatly aid this would be to practice awareness without a body. Specifically practicing this as a group and trying to help coax each other to awareness. It also acts as an excuse to snuggle Mami's soul.

 

[Vebyast]

Another idea -or at least an adjacent idea- is to feel out the witch's nature and try to work out the girl's wish if it's not already known, then try to empathize(or sympathize, for that been there factor, preferably from someone with a similar wish) with the wish in question and send hope flavored with the sentiment of what they originally wished for, preferably combined with the group welcoming them back. This will hopefully rekindle what drove them originally and give them a guiding light to follow.

Something that would greatly aid this would be to practice awareness without a body. Specifically practicing this as a group and trying to help coax each other to awareness. It also acts as an excuse to snuggle Mami's soul.

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This sounds like an overly specific proposal for "make them feel happy again and then add magic", which is 95% of every theories about dewitching. The issues are: getting past the runaway negative-emotion+grief feedback loop to make them happy, and figuring out what kinds of magic to apply.

 

[Muramasa]

Homura got bombed in the second loop when Madoka witched. There were no mentions of Sayaka.

 

[The Phoenixian]

Hold on. How would Homura have ever gotten Madoka's Grief Seed? Homura got witchbombed the hard way when Sayaka witched out, so Madoka must have died to gemsmash or physical trauma every loop before that. But Gretchen was a planet-killer by that point, so there's no way that Homura could have defeated her to obtain Madoka's grief seed.

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You're laboring under a misconception here:

Homura is witchbombed at the end of her very first loop as a magical girl, by Madoka witching out.

It's not impossible she went through the same dance Kyouko did with Oktavia before looping again, not even counting any other witchouts that may or may not have occurred in the timelines before Kriemhild Gretchen to grow beyond what Homura could defeat.

FAUXDIT: Ninajed by the koko

Anyway, on the topic at hand: Frankly, I've been assuming this behavior was the case since the beginning. It's hard to believe that each soul would have exactly one connection to a given mortal in any given reality when we've seen innumerable shenanigans related to sealed versions of people and people remembering other realities and so on and so forth. It makes much more sense that Homura's memories-only travel is a special thing due to her Wish and that other methods of traveling between realities would have different effects.

On dewitching, I expect that it's going to turn out to be something like Kirika's Antimagic - there's some hidden-in-plain-sight bullshit that will either be guessed out of the blue with zero warning or will be handed to us at the end of the game as a pity victory. I figure that dewitching will vary on a case-by-case basis, because it's obviously all about the people and everyone is different. It'll probably be most easily accomplished by getting a girl to talk to a witchy version of herself, in which case they'll merge once the witchy version is no longer so unhappy that her memories would instantly cause the magical girl to witch out. Otherwise we'll have to talk to the witchy girl ourselves and she'll have to regenerate a body for herself.


If we're going to investigate dewitching and the solution is in this direction, I'd actually say that the single best person we could do research with would be Kirika, if Homura has one of her or Oriko's grief seeds in storage. I'm actually pretty sure that O&K are the healthiest people we know right now, and Kirika in particular is totally irrepressible and perfectly equipped for pulling a sad version of herself (or a sad version of Oriko) out of her slump.

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Counterhypothesis:

Rather than antimagic, if dewitching requires that each witch is fed magic filled with various stimuli that is important to them in particular, then it could well be Oriko who is the lynchpin.

What better than clairvoyance to search for the images and experiences that can help bring someone back to themselves?

 

[Vebyast]

What better than clairvoyance to search for the images and experiences that can help bring someone back to themselves?

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Someone that's perfectly content with reality and can show that to another version of herself. Nothing about promises; reality right now is entirely satisfactory.

Oh, other reason why O&K are good candidates for dewitching: Motivation. Kirika will be all over the chance of having two Orikos, and certainly vice-versa.

 

[PulsarObserver]

Kirika will be all over the chance of having two Orikos, and certainly vice-versa.
chance of having two Orikos
two Orikos

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Homura will remember this

 

[HeroCycle]

This sounds like an overly specific proposal for "make them feel happy again and then add magic", which is 95% of every theories about dewitching. The issues are: getting past the runaway negative-emotion+grief feedback loop to make them happy, and figuring out what kinds of magic to apply.

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We have a "calm" reading ATM. It might not be enough, but is isn't similar to an active Witch at all.

The current state-of-the-art was the Kazumi effort. Is this instructive? I'm noticing that they were able to get a result that depended mostly upon "possessing shared experiences." The message seems to be that transpersonal memories are effective.
When we use a different physical template, and directly remove Grief, I think the stability goes way up.

It should be possible for random concerned Magi to call out a personality from her Grief Seed, and it should be vastly easier for her true friends to bring her out. It is a question of effort?

My own goal is to try a provisional body soon, using our Control enchantment and a Clear seed. Make a short charge enchantment, and we include a "link" on her back, ala Cyberpunk fiction as a failsafe.

 

[Nervos Belli]

Someone that's perfectly content with reality and can show that to another version of herself. Nothing about promises; reality right now is entirely satisfactory.

Oh, other reason why O&K are good candidates for dewitching: Motivation. Kirika will be all over the chance of having two Orikos and vice-versa.

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Hate to burst your bubble, but I highly doubt there are any O and K's in her storage. Pretty sure Homura said way back when that this is only the second timeline where they contracted. And given Oriko was shot to death without witching out in the first, there's no way Homura could have Oriko's witch in storage. It's technically possible she could have Kirika, but I'd say it's likely that seed was discarded, because Homura would have had no reason to hold onto it through many loops. If anything, I suspect she got rid of it quickly.

 

[Vebyast]

Hate to burst your bubble, but I highly doubt there are any O and K's in her storage. Pretty sure Homura said way back when that this is only the second timeline where they contracted. And given Oriko was shot to death without witching out in the first, there's no way Homura could have Oriko's witch in storage. It's technically possible she could have Kirika, but I'd say it's likely that seed was discarded, because Homura would have had no reason to hold onto it through many loops. If anything, I suspect she got rid of it quickly.

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It would have been perfectly sufficient to say that they've only contracted once before this. I'm disappointed that that possibility probably won't pan out, but I don't think that you're "bursting any bubbles". I'm actually faintly annoyed that you think that I had all that much invested in that particular idea.

Homura got bombed in the second loop when Madoka witched. There were no mentions of Sayaka.

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Hmm. Oops. Still not a huge change, though? Timeline 1 Madoka dies to Walpy. Timeline 3 Madoka suicides by gemsmash. Timeline 4 Madoka is a planet-killer. So Homura has exactly one chance to get a Madoka seed and it'd be if she defeated Madoka's Witch in the second timeline before going back. I believe that Mami was dead by that point. Madoka's Witch would have been double-strength. I... don't think I believe that Moemura would have been able to defeat a double-strength Gretchen, certainly not while off-balance from being witchbombed by seeing Mami die again and having Madoka witch out in front of her.\

If Homura does have a Madoka grief seed, should we offer to make it a Clear Seed?

 

[Ebguinea]

This sounds like an overly specific proposal for "make them feel happy again and then add magic", which is 95% of every theories about dewitching. The issues are: getting past the runaway negative-emotion+grief feedback loop to make them happy, and figuring out what kinds of magic to apply.

Click to shrink...

This is true. I think that resonating with their original wish, the hope that drove them in the first place will be a major part of the process, but it is just mostly the same "throw hope at it" suggestion.

Probably skipping a step, starting with the magical girl's origin.

The first step would be to address the witch's origin, finding out what drove them to despair, and addressing that despair, before rekindling what drove them.

To do this we need to be able to communicate with their grief seed. Practicing doing this on grief seeds would be a bad idea, for obvious reasons.

So instead we practice using soul gems, coaxing them to awareness and finding out how to interact and communicate with them, then taking what we've learned and(cautiously) trying to communicate and bring to awareness a (clear) grief seed.

This could probably be skipped by giving them a body to communicate with, but it would be a wise idea to know their state of mind and what they're like before giving them a body.

 

[Evilness42]

If Homura does have a Madoka grief seed, should we offer to make it a Clear Seed?

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I don't think we should even bring up the topic. I'm personally all for dropping the potential bomb under controlled circumstances, but if she did have a Madoka-seed from before Gretchen became planet-killer class, she would likely have figured it out on her own far earlier (because it implies that Madoka's witch gets stronger as more timelines go by, and us asking about it implies that Madoka's witch used to be weaker by extension), and the thread policy is to be excessively paranoid about any and all infohazards.

 

[Vebyast]

because it implies that Madoka's witch gets stronger as more timelines go by

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Didn't Kyubey tell Homura this, in as many words, at one point? I was under the impression that Madoka's increasing potential was known but unexplained and the thing Homura was missing was that it was related to her loops.

. I think that resonating with their original wish, the hope

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Not necessarily. Oriko's Wish was bad and wrong and she's happier now that she's rejected it and picked a new one. And the less said about Hijiri and Anri the better.

 

[Kaizuki]

I dunno, seems to me the process of witching out requires two things -- soul gem is emptied of hope and suffused with grief (1).

Seems to me the only condition we've met for dewitching so far is emptying the soul-seed of grief, and then we kind of looked at it and went "gee, I hope it'll suffuse itself with hope on its own" and, I mean, the moment we tried putting even a little hope into it it reacted strongly.

So, you know, we've had some notions about special kinds of hope of whatever, I dunno, seems to me we should try fulfilling the conditions we already know trigger one phase change instead of letting this thing try to hold back the hope with a layer of grief. Gems have a grief capacity in the hundreds of marbles, what I'd really like to do would be to just shove a couple hundred marbles of hope in one of these seeds 'cause I fully expect it to work pretty spectacularly. Would probably need help, though. Mami is probably the ideal candidate.



As an additional bit for thought: consider, what would result if you emptied a soul gem of hope without suffusing it with grief?

(Warning: do not try at home or consider in any other context. Kaizuki does not support performing such actions)



(1) -- you witch out when your gem is filled with grief, but necessarily if your gem is filled with grief it's sure not filled with anything else.

 

[blast flame]

Ok since taking Grief Seeds back is canon to PMAS my current assumption is that the whole "overwriting past souls with the current soul when you travel back" isn't something inherent to time travel but an explicit exception worked into her wish's intent to avoid the awkward situation of multiple copies of people walking around (after all if she also had past her walking around then she might end up friends with Madoka instead and that would violate her wish and multiple Madokas walking around would imply she didn't save her Madoka). But to qualify for the exception you have to be someone Homura recognises as a person and at the time of making her wish Homura didn't see grief seeds as people.

 

[Ebguinea]

Not necessarily. Oriko's Wish was bad and wrong and she's happier now that she's rejected it and picked a new one. And the less said about Hijiri and Anri the better.

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Also true, I was more speaking in general than focusing on fringe cases.
Actually wish regret is probably kind of common now that I think about it so finding new hope or helping them reinterpret their wish should be given due attention.

I dunno, seems to me the process of witching out requires two things -- soul gem is emptied of hope and suffused with grief.

Seems to me the only condition we've met for dewitching so far is emptying the soul-seed of grief, and then we kind of looked at it and went "gee, I hope it'll suffuse itself with hope on its own" and, I mean, the moment we tried putting even a little hope into it it reacted strongly.

So, you know, we've had some notions about special kinds of hope of whatever, I dunno, seems to me we should try fulfilling the conditions we already know trigger one phase change instead of letting this thing try to hold back the hope with a layer of grief. Gems have a grief capacity in the hundreds of marbles, what I'd really like to do would be to just shove a couple hundred marbles of hope in one of these seeds 'cause I fully expect it to work pretty spectacularly. Would probably need help, though. Mami is probably the ideal candidate.



As an additional bit for thought: consider, what would result if you emptied a soul gem of hope without suffusing it with grief?

(Warning: do not try at home or consider in any other context. Kaizuki does not support performing such actions)

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This is a good reminder, the simple solutions should be tried first and confirmed not to work before moving on to more specific attempts.

As for emptying a soul gem of hope and grief, I would guess listlessness, apathy, and detachment. Probably deep frustration or confusion about what they desire.

Edit: I had a thought of what would happen if a seed was filled up to bursting with hope, and instead of restoring the magical girl it literally burst open like a witch, except it's not a witch but whatever the hope equivalent is.

An angel? A white mage? A fairy godmother!?

 

[HeroCycle]

what I'd really like to do would be to just shove a couple hundred marbles of hope in one of these seeds

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Already on record - I like this idea.

Spoiler: close, no cigar?

If a Witch is using "the power of the emotion" from the astronomical Grief within the bounds of her Soul to create a "wish granting" setting...

If we could manifest around 1x10^5 the average amount of Hope normal to a human, as a total if not instantly...

If a Magical Girl could take that Hope into her four-space for storage...

Could she use the latent power of that hope to reach vastly superhuman functions within her fourspace?

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The holistic approach is worth trying first. My suspicion is that a group effort is the best way to restore the fully human emotional activity to a Witch.

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I can try to make a congruent theory - but it makes Magical Girl transition even creepier. Unless The Culture is one's cuppa.
But it conserves De-Witching.

Hmmmmm.

@Godwinson 's right that this should make us reconsider core beliefs.

The one I'm looking most askance at right now is the assumption that witches and magical girls are the same entity.

The main points that have supported this interpretation up till now are:
• Witches follow the thematic themes and beliefs of their originating magical girl incredibly closely.
• Witches have acted on the beliefs and desires of their originating magical girls on many occasions - Kirika, Kazumi, Hinata, etc.
• Sayaka speaks of having personally experienced Octavia's suffering in Rebellion.
• Homucifer, who is clearly Homura, is born from the witch Homulily.

I'm... not sure what it would even mean for witches to not be the magical girl that created them. It massively shifts the metaphor of witching out as depression, for one thing.

Still, there is some potentially interesting PMAS exclusive evidence supporting the idea of the two as separate, beyond Homura being able to bring forth a duplicate soul: Namely, that duplicate witches already exist.

We've encountered enough witches by now that at least some of them should have been "familiar-norm", instead of "first-generation".

And yet, we haven't seen any distinguishing marks to differentiate familiar-born witches from ones spawned by magical girls succumbing to despair. Ergo, familiars have been putting together a perfect replica of existing witches.

I've explained this away in the past by saying that maybe the familiars are just "patching together" a close enough soul out of many mundane souls, that the ideal of that magical girl's soul can manifest through the facsimile.

And, sure, maaaybe that's the case - you could even attribute the duplicate Grief Seeds that Homura creates to whatever metaphysical process makes duplicate Grief Seeds possible in general.

But I think that we need to consider the possibility that maybe a witch isn't the same thing as the original magical girl. In which case, dewitching isn't possible. The best we could do is the PMKM thing, where we create a new person from the ashes of the old.

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The setting makes sense to me through the lens of fantastic SciFi. Souls can be copied. Kyuubey doesn't cram any girl's brain into a gem along with her soul, it makes sense that we are looking at an upload process.

It should be unsurprising then, that a Familiar is a copy too, but running on a rather constrained substrate. The memory is present, but it cannot run all of itself on the hardware provided by the parent Witch.

One of the sources stated the victims of Familiar predation can still go to the Afterlife? If so, the Soul isn't what the Familiar is eating, that data was released. The soul cannot be life energy alone, given large amounts of biographic memory on display. An information part of the soul must be responsible for that. Otherwise the energy of souls would not be differentiable, individuals could not be defined at the level of souls. In higher dimensions, the information must be separable from the soul energy that it is written upon to make both true?
What the Familiar might need to become a Witch once more is raw energy, emotions, and live occult resources. Things to build itself a better substrate to enact it's own soul upon. We saw a Witch substrate, and it looked biological. It might be the ontology of building things from life energy, and in the function of nerves, that makes that appearance.

Perhaps copying a soul is reasonable in PMMM.

My hypothesis for the structure of a Witch is even farther out there...
Kyuubey makes a Soul Gem for a new Magical Girl, hooks it up to her body, and relocates her inside the crystal. That is not all it is doing, because she immediately has cognitive and functional extensions to her baseline humanity.
How might that be?
Additional equipment / soul extensions? Depending upon the modifications needed "to use Magic" those might be considerable additions?
The observation is that Magic works by correct and refined instincts right away. Weapons are driven with skills the girl never practiced. Reflexes move her by controlling her body at speeds a housefly could never match.
The easy general theme to engineer such a change? Probably an "expert system." Input a top-level goal, get output that completely achieves the goal without the rest of the system getting involved. Feedback is formatted to fit the host.
That is to say, a lesser AI. There is no point to make it a different person, or a free agent. In fact, some folks say that would reduce agency, potential, - Incubator payday.

What I'm suggesting is that a Magical Girl has become a binary existence, where her soul is the majority partner.

It isn't mind control, because Kyuubey has a twisted non-interference ethic. The rest of the system trains to match her, perfectly and reliably. When she Witches out, the expert system goes into insanity with her - and since she has put herself out of action, it continues on, now a leader instead of a follower. It understands power well enough, so it has to keep her Grief Spiral running to ensure that power is available for the demands of internal fantasies she/it want to pursue. And the harvest quota of the ones who made the synthetic part to begin with gets filled. Things Kyuubey might do to a Witch after her fall don't impact the agency of the Magical Girl, now do they?
This would explain why the Witch usually has such terrible performance stats. The leading portion of the consciousness is suddenly much less capable. The few more capable Witches in this model would indicate insane souls that managed to get a bit more influence over the synthetic components, or wrote that as code into the expert system during their lives.

 

[The Phoenixian]

I dunno, seems to me the process of witching out requires two things -- soul gem is emptied of hope and suffused with grief (1).

Seems to me the only condition we've met for dewitching so far is emptying the soul-seed of grief, and then we kind of looked at it and went "gee, I hope it'll suffuse itself with hope on its own" and, I mean, the moment we tried putting even a little hope into it it reacted strongly.

So, you know, we've had some notions about special kinds of hope of whatever, I dunno, seems to me we should try fulfilling the conditions we already know trigger one phase change instead of letting this thing try to hold back the hope with a layer of grief. Gems have a grief capacity in the hundreds of marbles, what I'd really like to do would be to just shove a couple hundred marbles of hope in one of these seeds 'cause I fully expect it to work pretty spectacularly. Would probably need help, though. Mami is probably the ideal candidate.

Click to shrink...

This is a nice test, but I think the primary problem with this kind of test is a logistical one.

It's not a block or insoluble by any means, but the fact is that the capacity of a clear seed is millions of cubic cm of grief. Enough that we estimated it would take around ten years to fill it entirely via daily usage.

As such, I expect that filling that with magic will require either a cheat (Can Sayaka's gems be given to clear seeds?) or just plain brute force manmegucapower.

Which can still be done, but I think it's going to require scheduling a large group session, or handing it off to a group of people with plenty of time on their hands.

As an additional bit for thought: consider, what would result if you emptied a soul gem of hope without suffusing it with grief?

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I think what you describe is basically the picture of being wraith-eaten.

Which... may well be what emptied seeds feel, if that is your point there.

 

[Vebyast]

The excess of grief produced by a Witch-out event is a dynamic system with a feedback loop blowing up as it approaches an asymptote. To generate the same amount of hope we probably need a comparable process in the opposite direction. Do we have anything that would fit that definition?

 

[HeroCycle]

The excess of grief produced by a Witch-out event is a dynamic system with a feedback loop blowing up as it approaches an asymptote. To generate the same amount of hope we probably need a comparable process in the opposite direction. Do we have anything that would fit that definition?

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HOPE-A-MANIA is READy tO RUMBLEEE!!!!

We need a stadium event to de-witch, and a great MC?

 

[Ebguinea]

The excess of grief produced by a Witch-out event is a dynamic system with a feedback loop blowing up as it approaches an asymptote. To generate the same amount of hope we probably need a comparable process in the opposite direction. Do we have anything that would fit that definition?

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Despair only requires your own echo chamber, but most hope feedback loops require multiple people to reflect off of.

Maybe figure out soul gem awareness and communication, then use Mami's connection magic to tie their gems together so everyone is feeling everyone else's hope, rebounding and redoubling. Then rainbow of friendship hope the witch away!

HOPE-A-MANIA is READy tO RUMBLEEE!!!!

We need a stadium event to de-witch, and a great MC?

Click to shrink...

To think, the answer was the power of hype all along!

Who knew?

 

[The Phoenixian]

The excess of grief produced by a Witch-out event is a dynamic system with a feedback loop blowing up as it approaches an asymptote. To generate the same amount of hope we probably need a comparable process in the opposite direction. Do we have anything that would fit that definition?

Click to shrink...

Well, If we're going with the wraith-eaten analogy, it's worth noting that Homura's soul gem refills and she regains her power when she reaffirms her wish to Ai. (It's a fuzzy match, but it's the closest thing I can think of on record: Homura's power starts to come back when the Madoka wraith dies, but she has an inner journey first and it's at the conclusion of all that that her power returns in full.)

It's an extremely fuzzy match, but it could mean kickstarting the process with enough hope and means for the witch to be active in the world as a person would bring everything close enough her to bring herself the rest of the way forwards by reaffirming her wish.

Otherwise, if that's flawed or not sufficiently close?

The only moment I can think of where that much hope is generated all at once is during the contract.

 

[Ompa60]

Since the grief capacity of a Grif Sid is so much higher than a soul gem, I assume a soul gem's hope capacity is also proportionally smaller than a full Grif Sid. It's possible that we only need to put in a soul gem's worth of hope rather than a Grif Sid's worth.

 

[Cae Lumis]

I do think there's potential in just plain filling up with sheer volume of magic but, as far as getting that specific response goes, I think Aurora's response there was to us being on an IRC during that point. It's one of the things we were doing the first day but not the next morning.

In particular that one leaps out at me because she's an internet forum themed witch. It's not so very strange that our time on the internet would be the thing of greatest interest to her.

... We should probably have Oriko and Kirika feed her next time we meet. If us being on IRC was what did it, then Kirika teaching Oriko to shitpost should drive her wild.

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Now there's an intermediate experiment between my "Lets brute force hope back into this Soul Gem via GROUP FRIENDSHIP!" and our current "Lets fiddle around with Grief Seeds by ourselves and let's see what happens FOR SCIENCE!" that I didn't take into consideration! Though with Oriko's current powerset, would she be able to monitor the... "grip?"... the hope is having on the Seed... or would Sabrina need to stick around to monitor whether its working or not.

My own goal is to try a provisional body soon, using our Control enchantment and a Clear seed. Make a short charge enchantment, and we include a "link" on her back, ala Cyberpunk fiction as a failsafe.

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Ok since taking Grief Seeds back is canon to PMAS my current assumption is that the whole "overwriting past souls with the current soul when you travel back" isn't something inherent to time travel but an explicit exception worked into her wish's intent to avoid the awkward situation of multiple copies of people walking around (after all if she also had past her walking around then she might end up friends with Madoka instead and that would violate her wish and multiple Madokas walking around would imply she didn't save her Madoka). But to qualify for the exception you have to be someone Homura recognises as a person and at the time of making her wish Homura didn't see grief seeds as people.

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Now, this does beggar the question... when we succeed in De-Witching a Grief Seed and convert it back into a Magical Girl... will it be just the Soul Gem by itself and we'll need to create bodies for them to inhabit (If its like that, then Madokami I'm already having flashbacks to As N Approaches Infinity and 1st Encounter Karin... HIGHLY recommend that fic btw, the amount of research into the lore and story and the detail is just... just read it), or will it be more akin to Different Story where Madoka wishes Sayaka back and she gains her body back automatically because of WISH HAX!

If it's like the former... what would happen if the reconstituted Soul Gem were placed in the hands of its respective uncontracted double? Would the Soul somehow migrate back into that iteration's body, resulting in memory upload... or would nothing happen? If its the latter... yeah the world isn't ready for the Sayaka Collective.