That's going to come off as a lot more disingenuous coming from a group we know raids and kills people, as opposed to someone who's motivations and actions were unknown and had Nadia and Oriko both vouch for them.
You know what? Let's do this. I'll pretend to be the thread, and we can compose a nice library of arguments while we're all calm so we can shut down edgelords and chaos cultists without engaging with them and risking losing our cool.

"Yes, and look at how accurate the information about Rionna was."

"And? Rionna was worse, and we were still wrong to execute her."

"They're just Thanos on a smaller scale, and he was totally in the right. Not even kidding; if anything, the whole witches thing makes their position even more correct."

"By gaining a monopoly on violence and using it to centralize grief seed distribution they are actually doing exactly what they claim they are - they are in fact saving lives. And similarly, of course kyubey drags their name through the mud by blaming literally every death in the state on them; they're guaranteeing that fewer magical girls witch out. We should be having them run our government, not fighting them."

"We're not the world police. We should just demonstrate that they can't hurt us, probably by showing off some griefhax, and tell them to leave."

"Oooh, that's a useful power, and they're willing to talk. They have to be at least somewhat able up be diplomatic if they actually sit in places for as long as we've heard. And we can fulfill literally any demand they make, so why are we even fighting? Homura won't want them in Mitakihara, but we can totally set up in a nearby city. I mean, if you really think about it they're just refugees from you horrible system, just like a bunch of other people we've fought. Hell, don't we have some magical girls on our team that actually killed muggles right in front of us?"

"Yes, and we're also friends with Kyouko. We have no authority or high ground from which to judge them."
 
You joke. I don't. It's better to have get this done now, when the people advancing these positions don't actually believe them and are engaging in good faith, than it is to do it when we're confronted by people that actually believe that Rionna did nothing wrong and are willing to resort to personal attacks when they run out of logic.
 
This is something that I have privileged knowledge about, and suffice to say, if the Iowa group isn't weakened then they're about as much of a threat to a city as Walpurgisnacht is -- which is to say, that if they wanted to, they could level a city.
This makes me very happy. :)

The problem with difficulty seems to be that even Walpurgisnacht will only be a threat because of arbitrary narrative-related durability meaning that even if we spend two subjective weeks shooting everything at it from time stop, it can't die without a fight.

So the Iowa girls need not just city busting firepower, but a way around that. They'll probably end up having some kind of super speed user, because magical girls don't do the arbitrary durability thing in general. Add some mental power to make it so we can't bury them in magical girls, a main front tank, some very long ranged shooter to wreck our prepared traps from beyond our effective range. And some degree of conceptual weirdness is always in the table here, of course.

But the real problem is none of this will actually achieve anything if we find out who is who and bring specific counters at a time of our choosing (and/or wait for them to be in a deserted road and start dropping shit from space), so they need to have precognition on top of that. I'm really not sure how sustainable this group is, grief-wise? Considering they spend a lot of time either traveling through areas with little in the way of Witches and magical girls or getting in expensive fights with large groups of magical girls. So they might need a particularly tricky grief manipulator just to keep up with supplies.

On the whole, i'd say they can't be nerfed and still be consistent at all. They'd basically become the Nine in the 'only kept alive by author fiat' sense.
Another power they might have is wide area antimagic. Something that could cover a large section of a city (or the entire thing, even) when pushed to the limits, and selectively shut down any magic the caster doesn't approve of.

Think about how terrifying that would be, even just from a psychological warfare perspective. Magical girls would just suddenly have their powers stop working, and soon after would have to fight against some incredibly powerful girls entirely without their wish magic and against magical girls who have all their powers still intact. Lots of girls might surrender just from that, given how big of a difference wish magic can make, and how some girls depend heavily on their wish magic to fight (see: Sabrina).

Even better, it would reduce the chance of a defender having some wish that can really mess up Iowa's tactics. For example, Homura could easily take down a standard invasion by ganking them from timestop. But if she runs into a field of antimagic and can't be in timestop while being anywhere near the invaders, things get a lot tougher for her.


I'm pretty sure it's been mentioned before, but them having some way to throw off any kind of precognition or other powers that could warn defenders would be really useful. An easy way to test if they are doing this (or might even be Feathers) is to just ask Oriko if she ever saw Iowa attacking us/Mitakihara in any possible future. If not, the probability of them being Feathers (or otherwise benefiting from Feathers blocking Oriko's precog) rises by a lot. If she has seen visions of them though, she may be able to give us some valuable intel on them.
 
That's going to come off as a lot more disingenuous coming from a group we know raids and kills people, as opposed to someone who's motivations and actions were unknown and had Nadia and Oriko both vouch for them.

Here's an optimistic theory as to what Iowa group could be.

"Ah," Yuki says. "An excellent question. They are raiders, from America, as you might guess. They move into areas and demand Grief Seeds from the locals by dint of their powers. The locals typically do not have the firepower to fight back - the Iowa group knows to pick their targets. They stay for weeks to months before moving on."

They are a group of scared people who do not want to fight Witches in non-optimal cases, a group who have powers suited to meguca on meguca combat, a group that is reluctantly doing all they can to stay alive, as they know how rare it is for meguca to live past 20, and how absolutely terrifying fights against Witches can be. They know that having a 99% chance of surviving a Witch fight will kill you within a year, and they are determined to not lose a group member.

They may have killed, or indirectly killed to do this, but in doing this, they justify it to themselves by saying that they are saving lives in the long run, right? Every magical girl they kill now is one less Witch terrorizing the general public in the future.

Not as a group of heartless people. just people who justify their own terrible acts to themselves, and wouldn't do them if it weren't for desperation.

In this situation, Sabrina offers understanding and friendship, saying that it's okay. If they regret what they did, and they don't need to do those bad things to survive anymore, that they won't be punished, they may just accept.

This would probably lead to some extraordinarily tense moments with groups that want revenge against Iowa, though.


To summarize this theory, the power of Friendship will ultimately work against Iowa, that they will eventually accept what they did was wrong, and think "We don't need to do that anymore". Repentance and forgiveness should work in a world where "everything is fixed".


This theory is the pinnacle of optimism, though.

Of course, if they truly don't regret what they did, they do obviously need to be imprisoned and prevented from continuing.

I'm also treating the group as a monolithic entity here, which is probably not the case. There is a possibility a forceful change of leadership, like sort of what we did for Sendai, will work.
 
Only nonlethally. Homura can still snipe them or use artillery, and we still haven't tested how timestop affects our laser.
Good point. On the other hand, there could be a power in there somewhere that can defend against stuff like bullets and artillery. I don't think antimagic defends against weapons made by magical girls (please correct me if I'm wrong), so there could be a member whose magic is good at protecting the group from physical attacks. Someone who can make magical armor, perhaps? An illusionist who makes everyone look like their position is slightly offset from where they actually are (wouldn't defend against artillery though unless it offsets them by a large amount)? Someone who can make everyone in the group invisible? Someone who can keep the group encased in forcefields?
It's also possible that the antimagic field can cover an entire city, and they start it up once they're close enough to encompass all of the magical girls within city limits. After that they'd probably use their sensor magical girl(s) (the same one they use to determine if a city is weak enough to attack) to hunt down any magical girls who might be dangerous.
 
The seer nods. "The deaths... Generally, you're away," she says. "It's close to Walpurgisnacht, and you feel the need to arrange for more allies."

"And if I stick close to Mitakihara?" you ask.

"Does not materially change the outcome," Oriko asks. "Your presence... I would hazard a guess that the, the, entity avoids your direct presence." She raises a finger. "I don't know whether it's an entity or not, merely that... it doesn't happen directly in your presence."
It seems like the solution is to carry Oriko and Kirika with us while we're running errands in other cities.
 
It seems like the solution is to carry Oriko and Kirika with us while we're running errands in other cities.

Well, how do you envision this?
( Homura question aside )
Store them in our hammerspace?
Let Mami bridal carry Oriko while we bridal carry Kirika?
Allow Kirika bridal carry Oriko while we bridal carry Kirika while Mami bridal carries us?

Yeah, that makes sense.
Means I need to sleep.
 
Here's an optimistic theory as to what Iowa group could be.

They are a group of scared people who do not want to fight Witches in non-optimal cases, a group who have powers suited to meguca on meguca combat, a group that is reluctantly doing all they can to stay alive, as they know how rare it is for meguca to live past 20, and how absolutely terrifying fights against Witches can be. They know that having a 99% chance of surviving a Witch fight will kill you within a year, and they are determined to not lose a group member.

This kind of thing doesn't sound unreasonable for the worst case scenario either.

Essentially, a group of girls who realized that they didn't have to take as many risks hunting witches or getting into fights if they could instead threaten other girl's loved ones via threatening the city they live in.

It's a common strategy for wild predators after all: They don't take fights they don't have to and if they can threaten another predator from its kill then that's free food without a fight.

So you get a group that sets up shop nearby, extorting help from local meguca by threatening its inhabitants until they run out of spare seeds and the group moves on to greener pastures (hence Tsuruya mentioning them being "gunboat diplomacy" types)

----------------------------------

Honestly, if we're dealing with "destroy the city" kinds of effects then I think one of the big things about going into a fight is removing Iowa's ability to project civilian/collateral damage.

As far as actual specific ideas go, unfortunately my mind can't help but keep considering the utility of setting up a barrier as a battlefield and forcibly pulling all involved into it.

"Unfortunately" because that does require finding out and fixing whatever the hell went wrong with our barrier last time but if we can and in the, highly likely, event peaceful efforts fail it could provide us with a place to fight without worrying about our enemies holding civilians hostage via collateral damage.

(Though I'll admit there is a small part of me that wants to see us fight alongside Homura by making a battleground for her to fight in, filled with munitions for her use, while we through buildings at people for artillery support. Because "WPN and Homu have teamed up to fight you" is just such a wonderful mental image.)

----

Returning to a more grounded note, I imagine we should probably also start talking about concerns and defensive when spreading clear seeds too. And not just with us either. Our ability to directly intervene will likely only go so far, especially if we're planning for worldwide distribution and a system that can remain stable place even without our continual involvement. (It's to the point where I'd like to start raising the idea of defense with groups we give out seeds to.)
 
(Though I'll admit there is a small part of me that wants to see us fight alongside Homura by making a battleground for her to fight in, filled with munitions for her use, while we through buildings at people for artillery support. Because "WPN and Homu have teamed up to fight you" is just such a wonderful mental image.)


Just add a remix of Surgam Identidem (perhaps start with Surgam Identidem and then fade into Magia) to the mix as Homura and (Maybe)WPN tear through Iowa... and you have the makings of an epic.
 
Last edited:
"Great," Mami says, beaming. She passes teacups around the table, carefully balancing one on Sayaka's forehead. Sayaka goes cross-eyed staring at the cup, and you go misty-eyed staring at Mami, because Mami being happy and confident enough in her friendships to tease someone is amazing.

This bit didn't get enough attention so far, so I just wanted to point it out.

Troll-Mami is best Mami.
 
You know what? Let's do this. I'll pretend to be the thread, and we can compose a nice library of arguments while we're all calm so we can shut down edgelords and chaos cultists without engaging with them and risking losing our cool.

"Yes, and look at how accurate the information about Rionna was."

"And? Rionna was worse, and we were still wrong to execute her."

"They're just Thanos on a smaller scale, and he was totally in the right. Not even kidding; if anything, the whole witches thing makes their position even more correct."

"By gaining a monopoly on violence and using it to centralize grief seed distribution they are actually doing exactly what they claim they are - they are in fact saving lives. And similarly, of course kyubey drags their name through the mud by blaming literally every death in the state on them; they're guaranteeing that fewer magical girls witch out. We should be having them run our government, not fighting them."

"We're not the world police. We should just demonstrate that they can't hurt us, probably by showing off some griefhax, and tell them to leave."

"Oooh, that's a useful power, and they're willing to talk. They have to be at least somewhat able up be diplomatic if they actually sit in places for as long as we've heard. And we can fulfill literally any demand they make, so why are we even fighting? Homura won't want them in Mitakihara, but we can totally set up in a nearby city. I mean, if you really think about it they're just refugees from you horrible system, just like a bunch of other people we've fought. Hell, don't we have some magical girls on our team that actually killed muggles right in front of us?"

"Yes, and we're also friends with Kyouko. We have no authority or high ground from which to judge them."

okay, so, you have indeed incurred salt, so congrats I guess?

just because our info is wrong once doesn't mean we should never listen to other info ever again, at that point we might as well be flying blind and there would be no point to ever trying to ask about anything

skipping over the next one just cause, I don't want to open that can of worms

the thing is, thanos WAS wrong, he was wrong in every conceivable way, cause first off, killing off fifty percent of all life won't change anything, because that's not now population dynamics or resource distribution wquest, killing off large swaths of any population is invariably a terrible idea when it comes to conservation, and when you kill half of all life, guess what? you also killed off half the resources

NEXT

the whole thing about them trying to prevent deaths by killing magical girls and therefore witches. first of, Oriko Magic anyone? that was orikos whole plan, and she was so obviously not in the right, also that was the exact same excuse used by the Tokyo group in sayaka quest, it was justifiable then its not justifiable now, and having them run our government? wtf we have been told outright that "tough girls make tough choices" is always going to be the wrong solution.

we have enforced our authority before, like in sendai and asunaro, if anything this is worlds more justified, because if it works and they leave then they will just go to kill more, honestly the risk of them getting away and killing more makes me sick

okay, this is a lot to unpack, first off, we can't really be diplomatic with them, given their super British gunboat style of diplomacy, we won't be able to negotiate with them. and our oriko and kirika have never killed anyone, not in this timeline

we know that kyouko changes, and Yuma makes her softer, and letting familiars get away and extorting and witching out magical girls is on whole separate dimensions of bad
 

Agreed. In the real world, Iowa would be no better than a band of roaming criminal militia led by a warlord and that construing their actions as a "Templaresque" attempt to prevent witchouts/ destruction caused by witchouts via Invasion, Occupation, and Extortion at Spellpoint till resources have been dried up is... a magnitude of leeway impossible to grant. Even if that is their intention (however likely/ unlikely that may be), the resultant suffering outweighs any potential good (in the strictest and coldest calculus sense...) they may have caused by reducing the number of Magical Girls in an area. Many if not a significant deal of these girls have families they can return too, and even the ones who do not have communities who would grieve for their passing/ disappearance after Iowa is finished. We have a pretty good idea at the population density an area tends to have with Magical Girl Groups... imagine how the news is portraying these events without understanding/ knowing about magic. The number of deaths and the amount of blood on their hands would be nothing short of Genocide.

Screw Thanos anyway, overrated Mirror-verse Grimace. Sabrina can do the snap better than he can and actually do some good with it.

That being said, we're on our backfoot currently in regards to Iowa because of the sheer distance they are in comparison to us. We lack intel, good intel, and intelligence is key to mounting a proper defense. However, remembering how Oriko predicts how she may die, and comparing it to Best-Mom Homura's warning to us: we're trying to fight all the fires at once and Homura warned us NOT TO STRETCH OUR SELVES THIN! She would know best about this problem, almost 100 loops of realizing that if she micromanages every problem that arises during her loops she runs the greater risk of loosing and having to repeat... I'm more than a little inclined to follow her advice and find ways of reducing our load.

To that end, I suggest we do the following:
Put Oriko and Kirika on Intelligence gathering. Kirika loves using IRC and Oriko's Clairvoyance is going to settle down soon, which makes them perfect as our eyes in the skies and intelligence gathering resource. Put Kirika in charge of asking around the US Servers (provided she knows enough English to speak on the US Servers... if not... um... I'll sit and think on that) and when Oriko's ability to see clears up, see if she can spy on them. I think it would also be more than a little prudent to ask our allies in Fukushima, Sendai, Touhoku, and Ishinomaki to see if any of them have intelligence on Iowa Group or if they can help us uncover information. The reason I left out Tokyo-Osaki Group was that it's my belief we can use Iowa as a lever to force Tokyo to cooperate with us if we play our cards right (i.e. Uniting the argumentative groups together under the combined threat Iowa poses on Japan.) and that having a combined alliance of multiple groups of our own (Our aforementioned allies, plus Pleides, and my personal hope of adding Kyushu into that mix.) will help "tip the scales" in a manner of speaking to our favor. Combined with amazing negotiation skills from Madoka, then we'll be able to ask Tokyo directly if they have vital information on Iowa and form a proper plan. Once we have that intel, then we can talk about how to act before they come knocking on our door.

As I mentioned way back when, we still have Ayase Soujo to worry about and she's a much more immediate threat to Mitakihara. Personally, I'm of the opinion she may be one of the reasons why Oriko might die, so protecting Oriko and Kirika from her will definitely be mandatory. The delegation serves a second purpose: it will allow us free time to properly prepare for Walpurgisnacht, figure more out about feathers, head off any other threat that may pop up, and other tasks without us guessing in the dark what powers Iowa possesses and then prove to be wrong at the worst moment. We can imagine worst-case scenario powers for what they have in our own minds and end up being blindsided by something simple after all.

Summary: Delegate, Delegate, DELEGATE!

edit: oops.
 
Last edited:
We should totally plan out an absolutely spectacular group dance routine, performed with perfect synchronization and meguca-level agility.
Perfect synchronization tends to make one look like an uncanny robot clone dance machine. Add a bit of variance. (Groans at the number of multi-member animated dance videos that just copy paste the dance moves and make it look a lot worse than if they just had one)
But Sabrina is not a professional. She hasn't studied for it, she has no medical degree in psychological therapy involving such heavy trauma as
How hard would it be to get a professional addicted to PMAS
Summary: Delineate, Delineate, DELINEATE!
Are you sure you didn't mean "Delegate"?
 
okay, so, you have indeed incurred salt, so congrats I guess?
If you can't handle those arguments now, raised by someone that's running them as an exercise and otherwise is disgusted by what they wrote... what makes you think you'll be able to deal with those arguments for real, in the middle of a vote, when they're being advanced by people that believe every word they're saying? It doesn't matter how many of the weak arguments you can handle when you leave the strongest arguments completely uncontested.
Invasion, Occupation, and Extortion at Spellpoint till resources have been dried up is...
You missed the second half of that argument: They aren't actually doing any of those things. They move in, make everyone play nice for a while, deal with the city's worst situations - people like Anri, inevitably ending in casualties because they aren't us and don't have infinite power - and leave when the city's stockpiles are getting low. After all, most cities don't actually have enough death-deserving villains for the Iowa Group to need to kill enough people to balance out their own presence. The problem is that this strategy works, so Kyubey's fucking over their PR by misinterpreting everything they're doing.

I agree with you that we should ask Oriko to gather some more objective evidence. I'm not particularly happy that this argument is available and I do not want to deal with it in the middle of an actual vote.



In other news: Homura. I don't know if anyone has come up with any hypotheses better than "the potentialbomb means she's not helping and she won't have any reason to continue because we're here." Does that sound like a reasonable thing to work off of? I don't care that people think it's irrational, she isn't you and she doesn't have access to your wealth of intellect and years of free time with which to philosophize. If that is a reasonable theory to work from, what can we do with it? Like with Madoka, find things that only she can do to correct the "she won't have any reason to continue" part?

We probably can't go the Oriko route, get her together with Madoka and let her conclude that her life's purpose is to accept Madosnuggles. Too strongly against her wish, right?

Is there anything that Homura can protect Madoka from that we can't? ...Yeah, loneliness and self-esteem issues. We should proooobably mention that at some point, but I'm not sure how Homura would take it.

Hmm. There's no chance that Madoka leaning over Homura like that indicates interest from Madoka's side, right? Say that Sayaka had been sitting in the middle there; would Madoka have leaned over her like that?
 
Last edited:
Hmm. There's no chance that Madoka leaning over Homura like that indicates interest from Madoka's side, right? Say that Sayaka had been sitting in the middle there; would Madoka have leaned over her like that?

I mean, we know for a fact from a ton of PMMM materials that Madoka totally has a crush on Homura. We don't need to speculate, we know it's true.

E: That said, I doubt the leaning in particular shows the crush. It's more apparent in things like how Madoka goes out of her way to walk next to Homura and talk to her about things, or when she hand-feeds Homu her grapes at lunch.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top