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Puella Magi Adfligo Systema

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DeclanDSI said:
I know at this point in the quest we're not going to have Sabrina act OOC, but it'd be funny if we suddenly did.

Sabrina: "Sayaka, you're an idiot. Haha!"

Sayaka: "Wat." *rages*

Sabrina: "Homura, you have a destiny to be Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. Mwahaha!"

Homura: "Sabrina, are you doing well?" Has Oriko somehow manipulated a magical girl into wishing for Sabrina-sama to be evil?

Sabrina: "Kyoko! Uh... Who are you?"

Kyoko: "meguca fans forget me. noooooo" *cries in a corner*

Sabrina: "Madoka, you are a useless princess that needs to be saved every damned time!"

Madoka: "Kyubey, I wish to be a princess that is useful! I don't want to be a burden!" *immediately dies and reincarnates as Tsukino Usagi (Sailor Moon)*

Sabrina: "Mami, I demand you show me your mamis!"

Mami: "Oh my!" *blushes*
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Homura: *nopes the hell out to a new timeline, looks for Sabrina, finds no Sabrina and cries*
 
DeclanDSI said:
What are you talking about? Sabrina is obviously a multidimensional eldritch entity. Homura couldn't escape us (Sabrina), no matter how hard she tries.
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There's an interesting thought: If Sabrina did restart, would she keep restarting the TL where its Homura's first time seeing her, or would Homura's magic let her remember things? Conversely - is Sabrina now a common aspect of Homura's loops and would Sabrina remember anything? Obviously we can't have a quest where Homura remembers us last loop without a GM being an *actual* precog, but an interesting thought experiment.
 
Dragontrapper said:
There's an interesting thought: If Sabrina did restart, would she keep restarting the TL where its Homura's first time seeing her, or would Homura's magic let her remember things? Conversely - is Sabrina now a common aspect of Homura's loops and would Sabrina remember anything? Obviously we can't have a quest where Homura remembers us last loop without a GM being an *actual* precog, but an interesting thought experiment.
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Store the Sabrina Terminal in her shield?
 
Dragontrapper said:
Always figured that was Nihilism vs Absurdism, but I only took intro Philosophy, so what do I know?

Edit: Random thought: How much philosophy does Sabrina know, given she's siphoning from our collective knowledge base?
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No, the second really is OG Nietzsche-branch Nihilism before the endless legion of edgelords sink their plastic fangs into it. Granted, he wasn't as colorful about it, but it's in at least the same ballpark. I can't remember the exact quote, but he said something to the effect of "a single moment of human happiness justifies all of meaningless existence" or somesuch.

The way I intepret it is that Nitz said "Nothing matters and life has no meaning, so use it as a blank canvass to create meaning" and then Hollywood cut out the later part of it for easy digestion by the mass
 
CaptainCece said:
The way I intepret it is that Nitz said "Nothing matters and life has no meaning, so use it as a blank canvass to create meaning" and then Hollywood cut out the later part of it for easy digestion by the mass
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That actually sounds like something I could somewhat agree with. Huh. Kinda wish I had taken philosophy, but history was so much more interesting.

Would still be nice not to have to assemble my philosphy knowledge out of drunken conversations :p
 
Dragontrapper said:
Always figured that was Nihilism vs Absurdism, but I only took intro Philosophy, so what do I know?

Edit: Random thought: How much philosophy does Sabrina know, given she's siphoning from our collective knowledge base?
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Most of the philosophers who seriously engaged with Nihilism seem to come to some sort of "nothing matters, so you get to make your own meaning" conclusion. Different ones seem to consider this more or less abjectly terrifying.
 
My nihilism is the Rageful conclusion that "Yes nothing anyone or anything does thinks or believes has any meaning or worth whatsoever." and then moving on unperturbed.
 
So, I am debating one further proposal.

Walpurgisnacht was originally a part of the overall plan here. The overall plan has basically succeeded -- the general assumption was that there was something reasonable wrong with Homura's understanding/view of social that was causing her to behave in the way she has and that it had ought to be interfered with, and that has panned out perfectly, even while the specific assumption that Homura was missing some critical pieces of knowledge about social has... It would be false to say it fell apart entirely (note the revelations about Homura's influence on this loop and the impact they have had) but it definitely did not hold up well under examination.

However. The nature of Walpurgisnacht's power and the reasons for why the various historical fights with it have gone as they have is a... Different and related topic.

The proposal I am considering looks like this: we should raise, here, Walpurgisnacht's actual power (no-selling essentially anything it pleases), how that power can be circumvented in order to slay Walpurgisnacht (getting it to let itself be killed), how Madoka was previously able to slay Walpurgisnacht via that route, and how we plan to (differently from Madoka) do something similiar this loop (implied is how Homura could do the same).

There are a large number of points for this and a handful against:

FOR:

1) At the end of the day, a fairly large part of Homura's perception of herself as "weak" is tied up in the simple reality that she's watched Madoka fight and kill Walpurgisnacht over and over again while not perceiving Madoka as incredibly powerful -- first loop Madoka managed it and so has every Madoka thereafter who tried. That perspective is toxic and explaining that Madoka did not kill Walpurgisnacht by somehow being stronger than Homura has ever become could do a lot for Homura's self-image.

2) We are going to have to disclose our knowledge of this stuff at some point. In the past in this quest things like our metaknowledge were treated as ticking clocks -- issues that we needed to cover because the longer we waited to cover them the worse the reaction to them would become. Sharing our knowledge of how to defeat Walpurgisnacht with Homura was never grouped in with those issues. I cannot conceive of a reason for why that would be the case except that our model of Homura was, for the longest time, toxic as fuck and could have precluded sharing this knowledge at all. With that gone, I would argue we are actually on a clock here. Sharing "how to beat WPN" with Homura will eventually result in Homura going "And you didn't tell me this sooner why?" and I don't like that notion. Therefore, doing it now sounds like a great idea.

3) Parts of our anti-Walpurgisnacht strategy are wholly accessible to Homura, i.e. she could actually go around going "I am going to do this because I know it will help kill Walpurgisnacht." On the list of activities I imagine Homura would to engage in, that has to be in the top five. Specifically, if we're going to be sane about things, the fight against Walpurgisnacht pretty much has to be dramatized, and that means some degree of choreography and planning. Homura actually has extensive experience with this! Like, extensive extensive. Like, the whole fight shown in Ep. 12 was at least 9/10 how a Walpurgisnacht fight should be organized, although the exploding stadium could stand to be replaced with a better finishing blow and I don't think luring Walpurgisnacht somewhere is necessarily the right notion (Big Bads always shrug off the planned trap, right? And then die to the weapon that the plan was to try to avoid using?).
3.a. It would be the prettiest thing in the world to frame Homura firing MadoBow as the thing we'd try to avoid using, but that's getting into details.

4) Actually talking with the two people with serious combat experience in our group about the actual method necessary to kill Walpurgisnacht instead of sitting on it sounds pretty smart.

5) Giving Homura tangible cause to believe we can kill Walpurgisnacht this loop without Madoka sounds Really Good.

I'm sure there are more reasons for this.

AGAINST:

1) Hypothetically speaking, talking about Madoka's power level(s) or anything to do with them is minimally tangential to the potentialbomb which is not defused as of right now (sadly. I would call this convo the first tangible progress we've ever made on it, though, which is still -- this was near to unimaginable a few years ago.).

... That's it that I've got.

Thoughts? I'd like input on this.
 
Kaizuki said:
Thoughts? I'd like input on this.
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How did strawberry shortcake kill the big circus tent, anyway?

Anyway, I can think of a meta reason for why we want this conversation:

It can give us insight as to potential weaknesses into Walpy, obviously, but more importantly it can tell us how 'simple' the fight will be.
 
Angrygenius said:
How did strawberry shortcake kill the big circus tent, anyway?
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She was a pure hearted heroine who sacrificed her life, so the theatre witch accepted that narrative and died, creating a tragic ending to the story.

Or, in other words, Walpurgis let her win.

Walpurgisnacht's magic is the ability to impose helplessness, which in practical terms equates to being able to become immune to absolutely anything. Theoretically if you're more powerful than her you can pierce the effect, but good luck being personally more powerful on a conceptual level than an amalgamation of dozens (or even hundreds) of witches.

Therefore, the more practical way to kill Walpurgis is to play along with her narrative nature - if you assemble a huge coalition of magical girls, overcome your differences, grow as a person, and so on, then she'll accept that version of the story and let you have a happy ending.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Walpurgisnacht's magic is the ability to impose helplessness, which in practical terms equates to being able to become immune to absolutely anything. Theoretically if you're more powerful than her you can pierce the effect, but good luck being personally more powerful on a conceptual level than an amalgamation of dozens (or even hundreds) of witches.
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We're an amalgamation of hundreds of people and our use of magic repeatedly makes us stronger, and our whole schtick is "fuck sadness"

Bring it, discount store.
 
Angrygenius said:
We're an amalgamation of hundreds of people and our use of magic repeatedly makes us stronger, and our whole schtick is "fuck sadness"
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Yeah, it's almost like the european white haired girl with a blue outfit and lots of voices in her head has some kind of connection to the european white haired witch with a blue outfit and a lot of constituent souls.

At best we can expect to have a Persona "I am the Shadow, the True Self" faceoff. If we casually chump Walpurgis, I'll eat my phone.
 
There is the issue that explaining this could make it not work. It's one thing for a protagonist to give an inspirational speech about how people can accomplish anything when they work together, and it's another to say "look, the director isn't picky about how this movie ends, so here's the steps that should lead to a happy ending." The latter kills dramatic tension and dances on its corpse. We might still be able to get Walpurgisnacht to play along if we layer parody on top of the explanation like Discworld's million-to-one shot, but I'd rather not rely on that.
 
Redshirt Army said:
If we casually chump Walpurgis, I'll eat my phone.
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If we casually chump walpy, I'll shake my head in dismay.

I want this to be an epic climactic battle. This is a battle that has and will have been building for a decade or more by that point. The battle for Mitakihara's soul deserves to be the biggest, baddest fight yet for this fic.
 
The obvious framing for a Walpurgisnacht conversation is to note that it's been a while since everyone who knows about the loops was having a conversation together and that this is probably a good time to cover the tactical situation in an environment where Homura can speak freely. We'll eventually want to have another conversation with the rest of our allies to provide the details, but Sabrina's metaknowledge and Homura's specific experience are harder to explain in a more open discussion.

Sabrina and Homura both have pieces of the puzzle. Sabrina has the meta understanding of how Walpurgisnacht's powers should work and Homura's got the experience to confirm or refute a lot of our theories. And I DO NOT WANT to be making all our preparations based on a potentially false understanding of the situation that we could have resolved with a conversation we were too sure of ourselves to have. That kind of hubris is really bad when narrative conventions are in play after all.
Angrygenius said:
If we casually chump walpy, I'll shake my head in dismay.

I want this to be an epic climactic battle. This is a battle that has and will have been building for a decade or more by that point. The battle for Mitakihara's soul deserves to be the biggest, baddest fight yet for this fic.
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Oriko explicitly warned us Walpurgisnacht was NOT the final boss.
 
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